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.
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