Enter Ziggy Stardust.

Bowie’s beloved persona began with the release of 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Stardust starred as the record’s fictional alien rock star who arrived on Earth just as it received the news that the world would end in five years. In the album’s opening track, which is aptly titled “Five Years”, Stardust laments about the planet’s fate while walking amongst it’s doomed species. He resembled them in shape, but is extreme in all other aspects. He had wild hair, outlandish outfits, and an overall zeal that made him an eccentric, especially compared to the cop, soldier, priest, mother and newscaster that populate the rest of the song.

In a 1974 interview with “Beat Godfather” William S. Burroughs, Bowie described the scene:

…It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. [The album was released three years ago.] Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock & roll band and the kids no longer want rock & roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ’cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. “All the Young Dudes” is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.

This image of Ziggy Stardust was a compilation of musicians that influences Bowie, like the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Vince Taylor. Kansai Yamamoto, who designed costumes for Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour, was another influence. Stardust embodied all that was glam/glitter rock, a genre that Bowie spearheaded. It evolved in the early 1970s as a sort of rebellion against the conventions of late 60s rock. Ziggy, in platform shoes and makeup, was one of the genre’s ringleaders. He challenged the norms of showmanship and gender, presenting himself as both flamboyant and androgynous. He was utterly unlike the other male musicians before him and didn’t adhere so strictly to gender or sexuality. As such an fervent outlier, he, along with Alvin Stardust (no relation), became a glam rock icon.

For his next album, Aladdin Sane (1973), Bowie would take Ziggy “to America”. Aladdin Sane, his next iteration, was a similar sort of outlier in red hair. The album artwork featured Bowie with an orange and blue lightning bolt painted across his face and a golden teardrop dripping from his collar bone; this painted man is Aladdin Sane. In contrast to Ziggy, there is as much a mania as there is an coolness surrounding this character. Where Ziggy occupied the space of an alien rock god, Aladdin Sane was more unhinged. The name “Aladdin Sane” itself is a play off the phrase “A lad insane” (get it?) and hints at the troubles of this particular persona. Musically, the record is still fantastical, but more experimental with intermittent sax and a doo wop single. It’s all over the place. It is not one, but two or perhaps more things at once. The lightning bolt that splits Bowie’s face in the album artwork echoes this split, this almost bipolar nature.

One theory behind what drove this crazed album relates to Bowie’s half-brother Terry, who was a schizophrenic. Terry was a huge influence on his younger brother, introducing him to things like Jack Keruac’s On the Road and John Coltrane. Bowie had witnessed his brother’s hallucinations, which he described in the VH1 biographical series “Legends”. Terry was institutionalized and later committed suicide, inspiring Bowie’s “Jump They Say” off of Black Tie White Noise in 1993.

Bowie would depart from his established persona and style again for 1973’s covers album Pin Ups. On the back of the record in his own handwriting, Bowie wrote:

These songs are among my favourites from the ’64–67′ period of London. / Most of the groups were playing the Ricky-Tick (was it a ‘y’ or an ‘i’?) -Scene club circuit (Marquee, eel pie island la-la). / Some are still with us. / Pretty Things, Them, Yardbirds, Syd’s Pink Floyd, Mojos, Who, Easybeats, Merseys, The Kinks. / Love-on ya!

Although Bowie still wore his mullet-like red hair for the album artwork, which also starred model Tiggy, Pin Ups was as different from his previous albums as they were from one another. It wasn’t original work and it wasn’t songs you’d necessarily have expected him to cover. This continued the pattern of the ever unpredictable Bowie. Everytime he mastered and surmounted something, he would move on to best something else. He would form yet another entirely different concept and a whole new character for the Pin Ups follow-up, Diamond Dogs. The Orwellian-inspired album was released in 1974 and returned somewhat to the glam of Ziggy Stardust.

For this record, he became Halloween Jack, who according to the lyrics of “Diamond Dogs” is “a real cool cat / and he lives on top of Manhattan Chase / the elevator’s broke / so he slides down a rope”. Jack is as eccentric as Ziggy and/or Aladdin. He wears an eyepatch, red overalls, a thin polka dotted neckerchief and a red strat. He has a different band of musicians, none of whom played in the Spiders from Mars, but the sound is more familiar.

Presentation-wise although much of his previous persona was retired at this point, Bowie still stayed with the androgyne and fluidity of Ziggy for the album’s single “Rebel Rebel”. In the song, Bowie sings, “You’ve got your mother in a whirl / ’cause she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl” and then later in the chorus “Rebel Rebel / you’ve torn your dress”. The gender-bending song became one of the most successful of the album and would be included in Bowie’s next album David Live in 1974.

His first live album, David Live primarily includes songs from Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs. It also features “All the Young Dudes” which Bowie wrote for the band Mott The Hopple. The album encapsulates Bowie’s career up until that point, touching upon all his persona’s while also hinting at the future. From here, Bowie would enter a more soulful period in his music. His next record, Young Americans, would be released the following year and would showcase Bowie’s growing fixation with soul. From there he would leaving his “plastic soul” behind in favor of his next persona: The Thin White Duke. The 1975 documentary Cracked Actor, directed and produced by the BBC’s Alan Yentob, catches Bowie during this transitional period. It opens with Bowie retiring Ziggy Stardust and continues forward through his Aladdin Sane/Halloween Jack eras. While it’s a celebration of those successes, it’s also showcasing Bowie in the throes of a cocaine addiction. In the documentary, he speaks eloquently, but not always linearly. He comes off as either crazy or a genius. Or both.

The drugs, the change of scenery and the need to sate himself creatively would result in The Thin White Duke.

by Zoe Marquedant