The…Fall of Ziggy Stardust…

45 years ago today, David Bowie, without previously informing most of his band members and inner circle, killed Ziggy Stardust on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon.

Artistically, I see this as significant because it’s about as rare as a $3 bill for a music superstar to flush the very formula that lead to his (or her) superstardom. Imagine the Beatles getting brush cuts and singing doo-wop in 1965.

My personal interest in Ziggy’s “retirement” is that it watching that very concert on VH-1 Classic is what turned me from enthusiastic Bowie supporter to slightly overboard devotee. Even more specifically, “Moonage Daydream,” blew my (you might think small) mind.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqMwE5NKaM

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

David Bowie “killed” Ziggy Stardust because he felt like the character had subsumed him, and he was worried he’d be driven mad like so many of his family on his mum’s side. Truth be told, he was probably bored with it all.

Anyone that really gives a shit about Bowie knows this; I’ve said nothing profound. It’s Bowie cannon, part of the official story.

Bowie-ites also know he created this character from an amalgamation of Vince Taylor, The Stardust Cowboy, and a wee bit of Iggy Pop. Again, nothing terrifically revealing.

But what I’ve never really heard anyone seriously suggest is that Ziggy was Bowie. The song “Ziggy Stardust” tells a story of both what Bowie already was and what he’d come to be after the character made a rock god.

The song is so autobiographical – we see in hindsight only – as to be prophetic, if that makes sense. And the song really is the character. Most of the rest of the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars masterpiece is either about Ziggy’s world, or nothing in particular.

Consider this…

Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly,

And the spiders from Mars.

He played it left hand

But made it too far

Became the special man, then we were Ziggy’s band

Weird and Gilly are Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey, his bassist and drummer. The real band didn’t become The Spiders From Mars until after the tour in support of the album picked up steam. Fiction became reality in that sense.

Of course Bowie played guitar…though not left hand. But he made it too far, nearly self-destructing within a two-three year period.

Now Ziggy really sang, screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo

Like some cat from Japan, he could lick ’em by smiling

He could leave ’em to hang

‘Came on so loaded man, well hung and snow white tan.

Aside from Marty Feldman, there isn’t likely a celebrity in history more known for his “screwed up eyes” than DB.

Bowie was massively influenced by Japanese culture, especially kabuki. No one knows what screwed down hair is, but his flame orange mullet – coming after the song – gave the character a distinct look. That Bowie look is the most emblematic of his many amazing styles.

And supposedly he had a big dick, attested to by many lovers. Snow white would certainly describe him.

So where were the spiders,

while the fly tried to break our balls

With just the beer light to guide us,

So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands?

I’d be completely bullshitting to cram a lot of autobiography into those verses.

Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we were voodoo

kid was just crass, he was the nazz

With God given ass

He took it all too far but boy could he play guitar

Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind

Like a leper messiah

When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band.

Ziggy played guitar

Bowie certainly was crass, though in a tasteful way, if one could make such a contradictory conclusion. The nazz – it means he was cool as fuck, the shit, da bomb, bad ass… I’ve seen lots of rock shows, live and otherwise, and his Ziggy stage presence was second to none.

Where this gets prophetically autobiographical is in his descent into a personal hell from ’74 to ’76. Cocaine psychosis. Heavy occult practice – he had his swimming pool in L.A. exorcised as he believed Satan dwelt therein. Fascination with fascism, Nazi/Third Reich history, and to some extent Hitler himself. With the help of massive quantities of coke and booze, he really “sucked up into his mind” and was lucky to have survived to tell about it.

So, what started as a fictional character around which he could tell an apocalyptic yarn, ended up being a road map for his climb to the top and near tipping over the cliff.

January 8, 2016

A cold, quiet Friday night, alone in the modest living room in the house of my childhood. I had returned to live in that place after my divorce, but I only expected to be there a few months. By that time it had been a year. I don’t know where they were but my daughter and girlfriend were elsewhere, so I took advantage of the solitude, got a good buzz on, and turned on VH1 Classic.

I had no notion it was his birthday, but I had to pause to watch The Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars Motion Picture. I liked Bowie and had never seen it so I figured, “Why not?” and decided to end the channel surfing. At the rest of sounding corny, that decision had a massive impact on my emotional life. Of course, I only know that now in retrospect…

The concert was enthralling! Even with the lousy TV audio quality and the seemingly endless commercial breaks, I sat there as if tied to the old, faded and ripped green leather couch that had belonged to my grandmother. I couldn’t get enough. Before the first song, “Hang Onto Yourself,” was over, I went from slightly-more-than-casual Bowie fan to mega-admirer. It was then, and probably always will be, the coolest recorded rock show I’d ever seen.

Mind you, I knew most of those songs well, even liked them. I knew a fair bit about Bowie’s Ziggy period, but I never imagined he’d absolutely owned the stage. You couldn’t take your eyes off Ziggy, nor could you ignore Ronno and the other Spiders. I know I wasn’t just imagining my reaction or buzzing hard. The kids in that crowd in July 1973 swayed and sang and screamed in ecstasy, too.

I’m quite sure VH1 Classic was celebrating both the man himself’s birthday and the release of Blackstar. Those details escaped me then.

But then they hit me – it felt like me anyway – with the video for “Lazarus.” I’ll never forget the “What the fuck did I just see?” feeling I had after the video ended. I’m not a stranger to arty, dark material, but I’m mostly a straight up rock fan at heart. Ziggy has just given me a couple of hours of the kind of stuff I normally live on music-wise, with a lot of theatrics of course…but I digress. “Lazarus” – I simply wasn’t ready for its haunting beauty. It was disturbing much like Picasso’s “Guernica.”

I fell asleep on that couch some hours later and woke up a different person. Again, that sounds really trite, but that’s what happened.

I must’ve been waiting for something new musically to love deeply, to get to know intimately. I tend to obsess over personal interests, especially music. This blog was once one of my obsessions.

Bowie, in response to questions about his sexuality after the wild and crazy 70s, said of himself that he had always been a “closet heterosexual.” I think I’d always been a closet Bowie fan and simply didn’t know it.

Bowie had always been there, like road noise outside your window. When I was little, stuck in otherwise boring department stores, I would beg my mom to let me hang out in the record section. I gravitated to the Bs because I was already very into the Beatles, with a mild like for the Beach Boys. Well, Bowie’s right there. Diamond Dogs freaked me out. This …person… or…thing on these covers has a man’s name but looks like a woman…sort of. The covers to that and Pinups were almost confusing for me as a six year old. I think it was then that I caught the virus, if you will, that laid dormant for much of the next 40 years. More on that later, perhaps.

Today, two years since Blackstar was released and DB turned 69, I can only think about that rocking evening on the old green couch, and how my musical experiences have been otherworldly since.