FEATURE:
Suffragette City
David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at Fifty
__________
ON 6th June…
a classic album from a much-missed musical genius turns fifty. David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars must rank near the top of the master’s best albums. From the early-late-1970s, he put out some of the best albums ever. I would put The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in the top three objectively. So iconic and strong as it is, I don’t think people can rank it lower! A masterpiece that is considered to be one of the most important Rock albums ever, it contains prime Bowie cuts like Five Years, Moonage Daydream, Starman, Suffragette City, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide. Bowie adopted various personas and looks throughout his career. Ziggy is, perhaps, his most iconic creation. The album concerns Bowie's titular alter ego, a fictional androgynous and bisexual Rock star who is sent to Earth as a saviour before an impending apocalyptic disaster. In its story, Ziggy wins the hearts of fans but suffers a fall from grace after succumbing to his own ego. Even in terms of fashion and looks, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars has inspired so many artists and continues to do so to this day (I would say Lady Gaga and YUNGBLUD are particular fans of the album). It is an essential album that everyone needs to own.
Rough Trade have it in stock…so there is no excuse to avoid an album that celebrates its fiftieth anniverssary in June:
“Originally released through RCA Victor on 6th June 1972, 'Ziggy Stardust' was David Bowie's fifth album, co-produced by Bowie and Ken Scott. Incredibly, the album was written whilst Bowie was recording 1971's 'Hunky Dory' album, with recording beginning a couple of months before that album's release. It was recorded at Trident Studios, London between 8th November 1971 and 4th February 1972, with the line up: Mick Ronson (guitar, piano, backing vocals, string arrangements), Trevor Bolder (bass), Mick Woodmansey (drums), Rick Wakeman (keyboards) and backing vocals on 'It Ain't Easy' by Dana Gillespie. as well as performing vocals, Bowie also played acoustic guitar, saxophone and harpsichord on the album and was involved in the arrangements too. The album eventually peaked at number 5 on the UK album chart on 22nd July having entered the chart at number 15 on 1st July.
Key to the album's rise in the UK were the two tv performances of 'Starman' on Granada TV's lift off with Ayshea and nationally on the BBC's Top of the Pops. The album's influence is immeasurable - it converted legions of fans, becoming the zeitgeist and a major influence on the next generation, particular those who were involved in the punk movement - musicians, artists, designers - and the subsequent re-birth of rock and pop.
Famously Bowie killed Ziggy at his peak at London's Hammersmith Odeon, on July 3rd, 1973, though Ziggy Stardust's influence was to redefine popular culture forever: pop music was never the same again”.
I realise that I am a little early marking the fiftieth anniversary of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars but, in five weeks or so, there will be so much attention paid to David Bowie’s fifth studio album. This was the start of his golden run. In 1971, he released the phenomenal Hunky Dory. Completely transformed in terms of sound and aesthetic, the follow-up is a very different beast altogether! I am going to finish with a couple of reviews for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Before that, I wanted to source from a Classic Album Sundays feature, where they discuss the Ziggy origins, in addition to the importance of the 1972 album:
“Ziggy Inspirations
Bowie had studied with mime artist/dancer/performance artist Lindsay Kemp and was adept at role-playing. He felt the need to write a theatrical piece and initially aspired to writing a musical. However, he did not feel he had the necessary skills, so instead created a character as the central figure for an album.
Bowie began to develop the persona Ziggy Stardust who was partially based upon the country-western cult figure, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, an “outsider” musician who was on the same label as Bowie. Another influence was Vince Taylor of whom another rock luminary, Joe Strummer of The Clash, remarked, “Vince Taylor was the beginning of British rock’n’roll. Before him there was nothing.” After massive success the previous decade, by the mid-sixties Taylor was indulging in heavy drug use and subsequently announced he was the new Jesus. Bowie did meet ‘the leper messiah’ in 1966 by which time Taylor was immersed in an alternative reality.
There is one more possible influence on the Ziggy character (and the name may be a hint): Iggy Pop. With his band The Stooges, Iggy’s wild, outrageous and sometimes self-destructive behaviour was as equally powerful as The Stooges’ proto-punk sound. Due to all-round messy conduct, The Stooges were dropped from their label and Bowie brought Iggy to London, helped him get signed to Columbia Records and then he produced the new Stooges record, ‘Raw Power’.
Rock’s Iconic Alien
‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars’ was released on the 6th of june, 1972 and a month later performed ‘Starman’ dressed as an alien rock star on Top of the Pops, an event that changed many future musicians’ lives. Opinion was divided. The freaks loved him and the traditionalists dared not decipher the alien in their living rooms. But any PR is good PR and this performance helped spur Ziggy to become the most significant mythological rock icon.
As a great vocal dramatist and with his cross dressing and gender bending, Bowie knew how to cull a personality. Around this time he announced he was bisexual while married to his wife Angela and drew a line between himself and the very hetero male rockers of the early seventies. The lines between the real person and his contrived character began to blur. Davy Jones became David Bowie who became Ziggy Stardust, his alter ego. He became obsessed with his creation and started to introduce himself as Ziggy Stardust on tour and in interviews.
Pop as Performance Art
Ziggy Stardust, The Stooges, Lou Reed and Roxy Music’s debut helped signal the end of the sixties and the hippy movement and marked the musical and stylistic transition into glam rock and punk. However, just like ‘Flower Power’, even Ziggy had to come to an end. After the band’s final show of the tour at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on the 3rd of July, 1973, much to the dismay of his audience and his band, Bowie, or Ziggy, announced that it was the last show that they would ever do.
With Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie had succeeded in turning a popular art form, pop music, into high performance art. He lived and breathed the character of his own construction until it nearly consumed him. He had to retire the character and “break up the band” for his own piece of mind and his own sanity. However, did still refused to expose his “real” self to his fans but instead, as a maestro of artifice, created another character, Aladdin Sane, who Bowie described as “Ziggy goes to America”.
Because he related to those on the fringes of society and helped fortify the pop institution of performance art and role-play, Ziggy’s resonance is still felt today throughout music and pop culture. Although Bowie killed off his alien rocker via a rock n’roll suicide, Ziggy Stardust lives in the hearts of society’s outcasts encouraging them to march to the sound of their own drum”.
I am going to finish with two detailed reviews that provide different slants and angles. This is what Rolling Stone had to say when they reviewed The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars:
“Upon the release of David Bowie’s most thematically ambitious, musically coherent album to date, the record in which he unites the major strengths of his previous work and comfortably reconciles himself to some apparently inevitable problems, we should all say a brief prayer that his fortunes are not made to rise and fall with the fate of the “drag-rock” syndrome — that thing that’s manifesting itself in the self-conscious quest for decadence which is all the rage at the moment in trendy Hollywood, in the more contrived area of Alice Cooper’s presentation, and, way down in the pits, in such grotesqueries as Queen, Nick St. Nicholas’ trio of feathered, sequined Barbie dolls. And which is bound to get worse.
For although Lady Stardust himself has probably had more to do with androgony’s current fashionableness in rock than any other individual, he has never made his sexuality anything more than a completely natural and integral part of his public self, refusing to lower it to the level of gimmick but never excluding it from his image and craft. To do either would involve an artistically fatal degree of compromise.
Which is not to say that he hasn’t had a great time with it. Flamboyance and outrageousness are inseparable from that campy image of his, both in the Bacall and Garbo stages and in his new butch, street-crawler appearance that has him looking like something out of the darker pages of City of Night. It’s all tied up with the one aspect of David Bowie that sets him apart from both the exploiters of transvestitism and writer/performers of comparable tallent — his theatricality.
The news here is that he’s managed to get that sensibility down on vinyl, not with an attempt at pseudo-visualism (which, as Mr. Cooper has shown, just doesn’t cut it), but through employment of broadly mannered styles and deliveries, a boggling variety of vocal nuances that provide the program with the necessary depth, a verbal acumen that is now more economic and no longer clouded by storms of psychotic, frenzied music, and, finally, a thorough command of the elements of rock & roll. It emerges as a series of concise vignettes designed strictly for the ear.
Side two is the soul of the album, a kind of psychological equivalent of Lola vs. Powerman that delves deep into a matter close to David’s heart: What’s it all about to be a rock & roll star? It begins with the slow, fluid “Lady Stardust,” a song in which currents of frustration and triumph merge in an overriding desolation. For though “He was alright, the band was altogether” (sic), still “People stared at the makeup on his face/Laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace.” The pervading bittersweet melancholy that wells out of the contradictions and that Bowie beautifully captures with one of the album’s more direct vocals conjures the picture of a painted harlequin under the spot-light of a deserted theater in the darkest hour of the night.
“Star” springs along handsomely as he confidently tells us that “I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star.” Here Bowie outlines the dazzling side of the coin: “So inviting — so enticing to play the part.” His singing is a delight, full of mocking intonations and backed way down in the mix with excessive, marvelously designed “Ooooohh la la la”‘s and such that are both a joy to listen to and part of the parodic undercurrent that runs through the entire album.
“Hang on to Yourself” is both a kind warning and an irresistible erotic rocker (especially the handclapping chorus), and apparently Bowie has decided that since he just can’t avoid cramming too many syllables into his lines, he’ll simply master the rapid-fire, tongue-twisting phrasing that his failing requires. “Ziggy Stardust” has a faint ring of The Man Who Sold the World to it — stately, measured, fuzzily electric. A tale of intragroup jealousies, it features some of Bowie’s more adventuresome imagery, some of which is really the nazz: “So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands?”
David Bowie’s supreme moment as a rock & roller is “Suffragette City,” a relentless, spirited Velvet Underground-styled rush of chomping guitars. When that second layer of guitar roars in on the second verse you’re bound to be a goner, and that priceless little break at the end — a sudden cut to silence from a mighty crescendo, Bowie’s voice oozing out as a brittle, charged “Oooohh Wham Bam Thank you Ma’am!” followed hard by two raspy guitar bursts that suck you back into the surging meat of the chorus — will surely make your tum do somersaults. And as for our Star, well, now “There’s only room for one and here she comes, here she comes.”
But the price of playing the part must be paid, and we’re precipitously tumbled into the quietly terrifying despair of “Rock & Roll Suicide.” The broken singer drones: “Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth/Then you pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette.” But there is a way out of the bleakness, and it’s realized with Bowie’s Lennon-like scream: “You’re not alone, gimme your hands/You’re wonderful, gimme your hands.” It rolls on to a tumultuous, impassioned climax, and though the mood isn’t exactly sunny, a desperate, possessed optimism asserts itself as genuine, and a new point from which to climb is firmly established.
Side one is certainly less challenging, but no less enjoyable from a musical standpoint. Bowie’s favorite themes — Mortality (“Five Years,” “Soul Love”), the necessity of reconciling oneself to Pain (those two and “It Ain’t Easy”), the New Order vs. the Old in sci-figarments (“Starman”) — are presented with a consistency, a confidence, and a strength in both style and technique that were never fully realized in the lashing The Man Who Sold the World or the uneven and too often stringy Hunky Dory.
Bowie initiates “Moonage Daydream” on side one with a riveting bellow of “I’m an alligator” that’s delightful in itself but which also has a lot to do with what Rise and Fall … is all about. Because in it there’s the perfect touch of selfmockery, a lusty but forlorn bravado that is the first hint of the central duality and of the rather spine-tingling questions that rise from it: Just how big and tough is your rock & roll star? How much of him is bluff and how much inside is very frightened and helpless? And is this what comes of our happily dubbing someone as “bigger than life”?
David Bowie has pulled off his complex task with consummate style, with some great rock & roll (the Spiders are Mick Ronson on guitar and piano, Mick Woodmansey on drums and Trevor Bolder on bass; they’re good), with all the wit and passion required to give it sufficient dimension and with a deep sense of humanity that regularly emerges from behind the Star facade. The important thing is that despite the formidable nature of the undertaking, he hasn’t sacrificed a bit of entertainment value for the sake of message.
I’d give it at least a 99”.
I shall wrap up with the BBC’s 2002 take on one of the greatest albums of all time. I know that there will be new reviews and features written about The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars before 6th June:
“It sounds like a cliché, but to an entire generation this album has become a yardstick by which to measure all others. Why the hyperbole? Because the strength of Ziggy lies in its completeness. Not a track is out of place, in fact not a NOTE is out of place, and at just over 38 minutes it is (and this has been scientifically proven, boys and girls) the perfect length. Every R&B and Hip Hop artist in the universe take note. So, does it still stand up after 30 years? Is it a major strand in rock's rich tapestry, with its gender bending bravado and melodramatic sweep; or just an ephemeral piece of fluff about a bisexual pop star living through the apocalyptic countdown?
With its so-called classic status written in stone, a perverse logic makes you want to reassess the album in a negative light. It can't be as good as all that can it? But remember, there's a reason why all those bands have dined out on this sonic template (step forward Suede, Supergrass and countless others). Within two short years Bowie had transformed himself from fey folk wannabe into a glam icon, via a brief flirtation with heavy metal. In doing this, lest we forget, he forged the template for the truly modern pop star that has yet to be broken. How this was achieved had a lot to do with two factors.
One was his adoption of three lads from Hull as his backing band, renaming them the Spiders From Mars and thus making the wild Les Paul stylings of guitarist Mick Ronson an essential element of his sound. The second was young David''s choice of producer. Most people associate Tony Visconti (the man who gave Bolan his glam sheen and who had played on and produced the aforementioned metal album The Man Who Sold The World) with this period. It was, in fact, with his previous album Hunky Dory that DB found the perfect studio partner for this phase in his mercurial career. The pairing of Bowie with Ken Scott at Trident studios allowed him to finally nail a simple format of guitar, bass, drums and piano into the place where the New York nihilism of the Velvet Underground met a quintessentially English way with a tune and a vocal. Ziggy represents the peak of their achievement.
Having perfected the format Bowie took his greatest leap forward by taking a cycle of songs and moulding it into a loose story of the nominal Ziggy and his Christ-like rise and fall at the hands of adoring fans. It allowed Bowie to take the central role onstage, hiding behind a mask of glamorous decadence that some would say hes yet to renounce. The songs weren't bad either. The part sci fi, part demi-monde narrative unfolds via the sophisticated use of shifting perspectives, beginning with "Five Years" and its tale of despairing humanity at the brink of destruction. Ziggy is observed through the eyes of one besotted fan who, following the star's death, takes their own life in the thrilling climax of "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". From piano-led sumptuousness ("Lady Stardust") to plain old dirty riffage ("Suffragette City") Dave was on a creative roll that would catapult him to the heights of success but ultimately lead him to destroy the Frankenstein's monster that had him and his audience confusing fantasy and reality.
So here it is, with the obligatory second disc featuring early versions by fake band Arnold Corns, demos, outtakes that most bands would kill to have as prime material (including "Velvet Goldmine": yes, the film was named after it), b-sides and one of Bowie's greatest singles, "John I'm Only Dancing". It's a worthy treatment of such an aural treasure and one can only hope that generations to come will come to love it as much as their peers. Ultimately, what Ziggy really represents is an artist who was in the right place, with the right people and the right songs at the right time. The future held plenty more surprises; but for millions this will always be the place where the world's most famous Martian truly fell to earth”.
Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary on 6th June, I wanted to spend some time with a landmark David Bowie release. Perhaps his finest album to that point, it remains a work of wonder that, to many, was his absolute best. With so many notable and timeless songs and deep cuts that are just as satisfying and strong, there is no denying the fact that The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a masterpiece. A grand and hugely captivating album, it is going to be one that people look back on decades from now and marvel at. Even though its creator is no longer with us, like all of his music, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will live forever. This stunning album truly is…
A work of art.