50 Years of Ziggy Stardust

David Bowie’s legacy has far outpaced any single album that he put out over his nearly 50-year career that it would be foolish to try to pin it one sound. But tracing the arc of his career even six years after his death leads you to a place out among the stars. A place Bowie didn’t just imagine but created on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars.

Whenever I first throw on a record, I engage with it. Sometimes as the record continues though, my level of engagement wanes. It becomes passive. This is especially true if the album starts to sound too similar from track to track. I start to space out. The album starts to become background noise. I have to check-in with the record again, orient myself, maybe even restart a song. There are some albums that grab me and never let go. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars is one of those records. In fact, it was the first record that made me feel that way.

The album’s opening track – “5 Years” – begins like a song from Bowie’s album from just a year before this one, Hunky Dory. It plays strong to the slow drum beat and sweeping piano. Then a shift starts to happen. An echo starts to follow Bowie’s vocals. He creates space. By the end of the track, there is a desperation that takes hold of Bowie and the listener alike. He ceases singing and starts shouting. Shouting into the same space that he carefully created in previous verses. The song then crashes into its crescendo with a fervor matching the lyrics warning of Earth’s impending doom in (guess when?) five years. It sets up a running theme across Ziggy: no song will end just how it started and you won’t want to miss a beat.

In fact, there’s no song on this record that is quite like the ones that come after or before it. The musical motifs are certainly present, especially through Mick Ronson’s piano and guitar work, but each song is its own little world. Planets floating through space. The album overall follows a loose concept record structure. It tells a tale of the impending destruction of Earth as warned about by a starman named Ziggy Stardust. Even at the record’s most cynical turns, it manages to feel like a comfort. The refrain that ends the entire album (on “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”) is:

I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain/You’re not alone/Just turn on with me and you’re not alone/Gimme your hands cause you’re wonderful.

As the course of the album follows the character and style that Bowie, Woodmansey, Ronson, and Bolder crafted for this record, you’d be hard pressed to try and find a lyrical through line from song-to-song. For one, the producer, audio engineer. and mixing engineer on the record, Ken Scott, has explicitly stated that there was never an intentional effort to make a concept record. Some tracks fit neatly into that box, while others didn’t. Each successive track builds on the last, but they don’t all tell parts of the same story. Including Bowie’s cover of Three Dog Night’s “It Ain’t Easy.” This song is one of the first clues that you are not just listening to a musician at the height of their powers, you are listening to someone do something that has never quite been done before.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a bridge. A connector between sounds of the late 1960s and early 1970s and something that defies genre and era classification altogether. What makes “It Ain’t Easy” a turning point in the record is the very fact that it’s a cover of an existing song. It lays bare exactly what is happening. The three-song run starting with “It Ain’t Easy” and ending with “Star” all contribute to the idea of the album as a bridge. “It Ain’t Easy” follows a structure and sound much closer to what you would hear in blues rock (again, a testament to Ronson on lead and Bolder on bass) at that time. A record you might hear from Bowie’s contemporaries at the time like The Allman Brothers Band or Creedence Clearwater Revival. “It Ain’t Easy” segues into “Lady Stardust,” which again switches up the style. This track sounds like something you might hear from another one of Bowie’s contemporaries, Elton John. It has the theatrical vocal performance mixed with a piano dictating most of the instrumental ebbs and flows (it truly cannot be overstated just how important Mick Ronson was in crafting the sonic landscape of this record). Finally, “Star” rounds out of this trio of songs. This song seems to take inspiration from far earlier than the other two, back to some of the origins of rock ‘n’ roll. The rollicking melody and drum beat are built around a similar song structure to Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” or Bo Diddley’s “Don’t Let It Go (Hold On To What You Got).” The structure of all of those songs almost feels out of place on the rest of this record. It’s supposed to be a spacey album. To this day, the album stands as the glam rock record many others aspire to be. But that’s all part of what makes it special. The rollicking melody on “Star,” the theatrical vocals on “Lady Stardust,” and the blues guitar riffs on “It Ain’t Easy” are sprinkled throughout the rest of the record too. They often stand in between the modulated vocals, the saxophone solos, and the synthesizers. Sometimes, they are even more obvious like the Elvis-inspired inflections on “Suffragette City.” It is precisely that combination of elements of music of the time and those spacey sounds that creates the feeling that you are not listening to a record that is of this Earth. It is an important distinction to make that the confluence of sounds is not just of older or contemporary music and what would come in the 80s and beyond. It’s a bit misleading to just recognize the futuristic sounds without acknowledging that the intersection between the two creates something entirely new. It creates an atmosphere beyond the lyrical concept that feels as though you are traveling through space. Sometimes that travel is in a rocket marked by the soaring of Ronson’s guitar on the outro “Moonage Daydream.” Sometimes that travel gets you close to the edge of nothingness like Bowie’s frenetic vocal performance on “Five Years.” Sometimes the off-beat roll of Mick Woodmansey’s drums slows that travel till you are floating in space. No matter what speed you’re moving at or where you are, you know that whatever you are feeling, you are feeling it for the first time each time you press play.

Despite Hunky Dory’s critical standing today, it wasn’t until The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars that David Bowie truly became a star. The record signified a tremendous amount both about his career and music itself. He was not the originator of glam rock, but he (along with his other subsequent works with producers like Tony Visconti) often took it to heights others could only dream about. On top of that, this record signified the first of a number of his characters on albums to come (think The Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane, and more). It was the start of him toying with concept records, just to be truly fulfilled years later on Station to Station. Perhaps the most enduring quality of this particular record is not that it sent Bowie into the stars but just how timeless it remains. The record plays as fresh as it has ever been. The sounds feel so singular, even when you’ve heard them emulated in record after record since Ziggy’s release in 1972. Maybe that’s what remains so stirring after all these years. That someone born more than 20 years after the album’s release can listen to the album and find themselves transported back to a time they never experienced and to a place they’ll likely never see. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spider From Mars is truly not of this world.

Favorite Songs

1. Moonage Daydream

2. Starman

3. Five Years

4. Ziggy Stardust

5. Soul Love