David Bowie Couldn’t ‘Cope’ With Being Himself—So He Became Ziggy Stardust
“DAVID BOWIE IS ZIGGY STARDUST” the press release from RCA Records blasted out to the world on June 16, 1972. With the eventual breakout single “Starman” already percolating on the U.K. charts, and after eight years mostly spent in the showbiz wilderness, David Bowie was about to become a global superstar. Bowie had conceived The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars in the autumn of 1971, initially as “a concept of the life cycle of a rock and roll star.” Recording sessions soon commenced at Trident Studios in London, hot on the heels of Bowie’s fourth album, Hunky Dory.
“Two weeks after completing Hunky Dory, David was in Trident and said, ‘We’re going to record another album,’” Ken Scott, the co-producer on both albums, recalls. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking. We’ve only just finished Hunky Dory. It’s not even out yet.’ He explained, ‘They want me to have another one in the can. But you won’t like this one. It’s more rock ’n’ roll.’ And he was proven wrong. I loved it!”
But unlike the focused, economical sessions of its predecessor, the making of Ziggy Stardust was evolutionary, as is illustrated on the new five-CD box set Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, out on Friday. In fact, there are so many tracks included on Rock ‘n’ Roll Star—121 in total, across six discs—because the Ziggy Stardust track listing would be in a continual state of flux. As fans have already heard on the recent Record Store Day release Waiting In The Sky, compiled on Dec. 15, 1971, Bowie drew up an early version of Ziggy that included a re-recording of the January 1971 single “Holy Holy,” Chuck Berry’s “Round And Round,” Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam,” and his own “Velvet Goldmine.”