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40 years of Ziggy Stardust, and other musical milestones


jazzbo

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This June will mark forty years since the release of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars," the wild and wooly album by David Bowie. I noticed this month there will be a "40th Anniversary" edition or two and thought to myself 'Forty years--Wow!"

I remember this as a polarizing album among the new friends I had cultivated in Burton, Ohio after returning to the states from three incredible years in a boarding school in M'Babane, Swaziland. I immediately latched onto its zaniness, and the variety of musical arrangements and textures and instrumentation. One friend was quite captured by it as well and we played it in my basement room quite a bit and alternately laughed and listened in silent attention. It seemed to have mysteries to present, it seemed to be a form of sophisticated communication that was floating in the air outside our grasp. Ronson's operatic guitar, the saxophones, the strings, the weird folksy and cabaret bits and the out and out slamming rockers. . . this album was hard to peg and digest.

For those very reasons it was forbidden to be played among other friends who somehow could handle the contemporary "Close to the Edge" from Yes, but not this one from Bowie. And in large part it was the weird theatrical persona that Bowie put before us: to many a rural Ohioan he was from Mars. Cleveland radio had done a successful job of bringing the recordings of many English bands onto the airwaves and turntables of young Ohioans, but many other bands were more easily accepted. And there were all those macho American bands and singers too, so different than Bowie. But I was a bit of a stranger in a strange land, and this album intrigued me.

I was discovering electric Miles and moving on to Louis Armstrong and other jazz too at this time, and in the next few years at college I began really collecting records of several genres with zeal, and followed the next half a dozen by Bowie. But Ziggy was the one that had really connected with me, and I again had a friend to spin this with often in my dorm, who would also always sneak it into the rotation at parties. I remember dancing to several songs from the album a handful of times at parties with the gal I was crazy about, Helen Elizabeth Haggerty, who lived on the dorm floor above me. I felt confident enough with my dancing to this music to ask her to dance, and these dances led to a friendship that took a long and winding road to the most important relationship in my life fifteen years later.

I hear the album now and I can more clearly see the craft and guile that went into its creation, and see how rich it was for its time, the many layers that I circled over and over at 33 and a third rpm for years. And I listen and smile and move myself and think "forty years--wow!" So much time has passed, so many different stages of life, but one spin and I'm able to reach back to those friends and that dance floor with the lovely Helen.

Anyone else have a history with this album? Or a similar history with another?

davidbowie-ziggystardust-cover.jpg

Edited by jazzbo
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I was in the last 18 months of school when it came out. I'd just moved schools and there was only a small Sixth Form so it was easy to see the fault lines. I moved amongst the proggies with an affiliation towards the soft-rockers (Joni, James, Neil, Carole etc). We all hated Bowie, glam etc etc.

What was interesting was that another group in the Sixth Form took to it like ducks to water (they were also obsessed with the contemporary 'A Clockwork Orange' and used to carry brollies). They were much more working class than me and my more lower middle class friends.

I think a lot of the 'intellectual' attraction to Bowie as an 'artist' came a bit later as fashions changed amongst we lower middle classies. Lots jumped ship and clamed to have been Bowie fans all along.

The androgyny was a bother too - these were well before the days when gay pride had reached the English provinces. The whole dressing up in spandex, make-up etc was very unsettling.

Edited by A Lark Ascending
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Well, I was working class by background, and something else or nothing else at the time from my life experience of inner city Philadelphia, Addis Ababa and then M'Babane.

Somehow the androgyny was never really an issue for me. I actually didn't read the music mags or watch tv so it was only the album covers that had any visual impact. Bowie first came to my attention with "Hunky Dory" and I think it was the story-telling aspect of his work, and the theatrical creation of personas that grabbed my attention; at that time I was reading my Dad's "Complete Work of Shakespeare" a lot. :)

The singer-songwriters, the soft rock, didn't hit for me til later in the 'seventies. Joni reached me with "Court and Spark" and "Miles of Aisles"--when Joni got jazzy, I was there. Neil and others I got into mid-seventies too as I embraced aspects of the "counter-culture" as it existed in my neck of the woods.

There's something special about Ziggy that reached me then and kept me fascinated. I think it was the "weird outsider" stance of the Ziggy persona, I felt like a weird outsider myself. And there's lots of interesting music there, I still enjoy the album to this day.

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Ha! No, that just made me a weirdo. I didn't develop the habit of tv until far later; an adolescence spent in Africa without tv just had kept me from getting the bug. It wasn't really until later in the 'eighties that I began to follow tv. I found that it was a very handy way to have subject matter to combat shyness and actually talk to people in the workplace and to chat up young women. . . .

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Nowhere near as formative, but I have a very soft spot for the Stone Roses CD from 1989/90. It marked one of the few times in my life where I was cool and was a bit of a trend setter. I heard it from a friend in art school, instantly fell for it, got my own copy and spread the word.

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I saw him perform Ziggy Stardust at (IIRC) The Rainbow in North London. At the time I may have been more impressed by Roxy Music who opened for him. I didn't get a lot of Rock and Roll at the time.

Saw both Bowie and Roxy seperately at the Rainbow. Loved both but definitely prefered Roxy. Still listen to both but more often to Roxy/Ferry who I think are very underrated.

My favourite Bowie album is 'Hunky Dory', a masterpiece in my opinion.

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Ha! No, that just made me a weirdo. I didn't develop the habit of tv until far later; an adolescence spent in Africa without tv just had kept me from getting the bug. It wasn't really until later in the 'eighties that I began to follow tv. I found that it was a very handy way to have subject matter to combat shyness and actually talk to people in the workplace and to chat up young women. . . .

I went TV-less from late-72 to early 78; first abandoned by my parents and left with a little old lady in Swindon; then through university at a time when there was one set in the entire residential hall.

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I'be been thinking about it on and off today. Tough. Not like this. I'm not sure many folks could have such a deep connection as you describe here. This is special.

I remember starting a thread (rare) years ago about albums that had a lasting impact on me. RRK Rip Rig & Panic/Please Don't You Cry..., Out To Lunch!, Walt Dickerson/Richard Davis... but your connection to Ziggy is something else.

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It is special to me, I think mainly because it connected me to people who were important to me at that time, and beyond. Music is an amazing thing, more than just art, it's language and memory and meaning. And it can form strong bonds.

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Probably for many people a few years older than I. I confess I never really connected deeply with the Beatles til Sgt. Pepper's came along. And right about the time I really got into them, I got even further into Hendrix, Cream et al.

Is that a really important album in your life?

Edited by jazzbo
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So that's when you were middle class? :)

I sort of wish I hadn't ever caught the tv bug, but I sure did.

No, that happened when I got a teaching job. Plus the influence of an aspirational parent and being educated in a system that required us to seek out 'the finer things in life'!

I find it hard to single out single albums. But a sequence that sticks for me was King Crimson's 'Lizard', 'Soft Machine 3' and Keith Tippett's Centipede's 'Septober Energy' - all showed me a way of listening quite different than before.

Fairport's 'Angel Delight' (and the earlier albums I picked up in its wake) and the 'Morris On' album also had me reassessing what I was listening to.

Don't recall friends having much more than a peripheral interest. My musical wanderings have always been a mystery to them.

Edited by A Lark Ascending
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Nice story.

I've thought about this and I can't really come up with anything comparable.

The music may, at times, harken back to a specific event [lying back in a car

with a moonroof watching (shooting) stars while Eroc's "Kleine Eva" played],

or a specific favorite on-air DJ (in Chicago: especially, Saul Smaizys, Earl McGhee,

"Scorpio"...), but the idea of a social grouping tied to a specific recording just

isn't coming to mind.

®ø∂

---

Now playing: Art Zoyd - Brigades Speciales

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Probably for many people a few years older than I. I confess I never really connected deeply with the Beatles til Sgt. Pepper's came along. And right about the time I really got into them, I got even further into Hendrix, Cream et al.

Is that a really important album in your life?

Lon, all twelve songs were played on the radio so much that I was burned out on it in a matter of weeks. But Meet the Beatles was the first album purchased by many kids (including me) born between the years of, say, 1949 and 1952.

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You're undoubtedly right. It's hard for me (born summer '55) to see and feel the impact of that lp. I was too young at the time to really feel its then impact. And I was living in a neighborhood where soul music was on the turntables and radios around me. When the Bestles DID enter my life it was through the BBC that we could pick up on shortwave radios while living in Ethiopia and Swaziland. In '68 I somehow got a then not-contemporary EP with "Girl" and "Baby You Can Drive my Car" to play on the Grundig. The next year my Dad had to go back to DC from Swaziland for a week and he brought me back "Sgt. Pepper's" and "Magical Mystery Tour" which I had heard in the dorms at boarding school. My most vivid Beatles memory was hearing the whole or much of "Abbey Road" broadcast over the radio in the dorm after lights out. It was dangerous as we shouldn't have had the radios on, but it was a real "event." My experience with the Beatles was later, and I liked them, but by the same token I was listening to Cream and Hendrix as well and they fascinated me more.

Edited by jazzbo
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