Mirror Moves: On David Bowie’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Star!

A fascinating new Ziggy Stardust box set scrapes the barrel to paint a portrait

July 12, 2024July 12, 2024 Ryan Maffei 1 Comment 2024, Box Set, David Bowie, Ken Scott, Marc Bolan, Parlophone Records, Rhino, Rock 'n' Roll Star!, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

David Bowie Rock ‘n’ Roll Star!, Parlophone Records 2024

This box is too beautiful – and if you’re a Bowie fan, you’ll be absolutely besotted at first sight of it.

On the front is a ravishing Brian Ward photograph, fitted to 12 by 14 inches, in monochrome across silver foil. The artiste’s floral shirt, esurient gaze and jagged haircut aptly capture what he leapt to and from when he took his wild dare, pulling the whole culture with him. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star!,” yells the title (in Rise & Fall font) on two inches of spine.

And while it’s not a good title, the exclamation point works if you hear the joy and ache of “db” flexing his larynx into that hard-femme high note. Turn it over and there’s that same song’s mission statement, “I could make a transformation as a rock ‘n’ roll star,” and the silver is so cleanly reflective you can see your own face behind the lyric.

Doesn’t that just nail the point? One day, David Jones looked in the mirror and said this to himself.

The new Parlophone set purports to capture this moment – when Bowie reified his mad visions, and revolutionized the notion of pop star identity (a manufactured distance in an ocean of open hearts with guitars, wearing a concept on your sleeve while buying into it just like the public you’ve put it on for) – with everything outside the margins of Ziggy Stardust itself. Liner noter Tris Penna gets the era’s significance utterly right, because there’s simply no inflating it: At the height of hippie fatigue, he really did descend from another sphere, and blow the competition away. Penna does lean a bit too hard into the alien theme at times, referring to “the 24-year-old Bowie emulated.” But it was all so savvy and sweeping, it merits this 5.5 pound intergalactic monolith, and every effusion within.

“Offstage I’m a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion.” There’s enough footage around of placid, post-fall-to-Earth Bowie – the delicate, bookish fellow berating MTV for its lack of Black representation with unbelievable civility – to recall without double-checking that he was an untheatrical oddball, deeply reticent. This compelled his change, the way an actor can as if by magic do things onstage they never would dream of in real life: “If I don’t like David Jones, we’ll think of someone else for a bit.” No lesser a light than John Lennon would mock this in interviews, as if his friend Bowie didn’t achieve exactly what he always wanted to, getting entirely away from himself. And chief rival (and forerunner) Marc Bolan’s bitterness at being superseded only grew in the last five years of his life.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Star! Unboxed (Image: Rhino)

At multiple landmark live shows, Bowie had pulled a Bolan in real time, morphing from troubadour to nouveau idol with a simple shift of guitar. Only the fact that Bowie was more culturally voracious and cerebral explains how he nailed what Bolan sort of missed. “The seventies were the start of the 21st century,” he’s quoted in the text, explaining the theory of the moment – and indeed, here’s the man who sold the world on the big idea. Nevertheless, listening to the scrungy demos and tentative live versions of the Ziggy-era material, some of which wouldn’t survive a careful final cut, the course charted doesn’t feel any more coherent than its parent album’s infamously foggy “storyline.” It isn’t Bowie’s failing: He discarded these scraps to get to the LP now spruced up for your bonus Blu-ray.

I would be remiss if I suggested there wasn’t a touch of ripoff to this lovingly curated affair – that the portrait it paints is culled from oil at the bottom of the barrel. It’s demos, radio sessions, the errant live set or audio-only TV appearance, that Arnold Corns single, a few outtakes and single versions, and that most irksome symptom of modern boutiquing, the “alternate mix”. Yes, the album it all led up to and out of is included. But bohemian that I am, I don’t have a Blu-ray player, and I can stream it again on [service of choice] along with the entire contents of the set – slightly less than four hours spread egregiously over five fleeting CDs – for rather less than its $140 list price. But if you have the wherewithal, you don’t need the why – the songs are all great, and fuck it’ll look good on your shelf.

How often you’ll take it down is the question. For at least a disc and a half, the theme is “not very good versions of songs you love,” all of which I sang along to very loud in my apartment. Opening with a rough demo of “Moonage Daydream” with almost totally different lyrics, penned in the fever of the artist’s transformative first U.S. visit in early 1971 and entitled “So Long, ‘60s,” is a conceptual coup. But the overall quality is not not garbage through a scruffy, stompy “Hang On To Yourself” and a detached “Lady Stardust.” Only geologists could love such unpolished gems. But by November’s “Soul Love” demo – he’s in love with his melody, and envisioning five (!) saxes “doing very soft sweet background work all the way through” in a spoken note to Ronno – we’re reaching the full epiphany.

Bowie, the Spiders (Mick & Trevor & Mick) and producer Ken Scott had reconvened to begin work on this project not long after Hunky Dory’s late summer completion. He had told Scott – like the soon-to-return Tony Visconti, a wizard with strings – that he wanted the album “more rock ‘n’ roll,” albeit in full “Queen Bitch” dress, i.e. mechanized, menacing & fancy fucking free. But as the tracklist was being finalized at the end of the year, right about the time of Hunky’s release, RCA sent Bowie back to add something a bit more commercial. What he came up with was seismic: “Starman” changed what was commercial. But there’s a long way from the fragmentary demos to the famed, fabulous Top of the Pops version on disc 3 – which it’s a shame Parlophone didn’t include on a bonus DVD.

Disc 1 also includes the preposterous May ’71 Arnold Corns versions of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Moonage Daydream,” whose quality is indistinguishable from the demos’ – the drumming is as bad as the name of the band backing Bowie, Rungk. Still, props for pop’s great gender liberator’s revised “Moonage” opener: “come on strong girl, lay the real thing on me.” A demo for a second single, the long-forgotten “Looking for a Friend,” is most distinctive for being engineered by future Queen/Cars mastermind Roy Thomas Baker. That said, there is a wonderful anecdote in the lovely booklet from Mark Carr Pritchett, the Corns’ second guitarist, about Bowie borrowing his red Les Paul guitar in an impulsive pinch one night – only to return it, ruined by raindrops, after the iconic Ziggy photoshoot.

Disc 1 rounds out with rehearsals at Haddon Hall, the Spiders from Mars raucously woodshedding – ragged and ferocious, but formative, and just little bit too slow. These performances highlight how arduously the Ziggy material came together, how long that ophidian magick took to slink its way into their works. The shape is solider but still cohering on disc 2, which begins with the pair of early 1972 BBC sessions that introduced this material to the world. According to “record plugger” Anya Wilson in the liner notes: “it’s worth remembering that the early seventies was a time before independent radio existed in the UK, so the BBC had a massive captive audience. It was like Big Brother – piped through every factory, every workplace, every everywhere.” Yet the Starman took his time landing.

A cute note on the back of the disc’s cardboard sleeve reads, “the sound quality [is] not up to the usual fidelity, but are included for reasons of historical importance,” which could be an apology for most of the set. (No such note justifies the presence on the same disc of two rote renditions of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which at least reminds you it’s a great set of lyrics, and while all three “Queen Bitch”es liven up the proceedings, that’s like a quarter of its 45 minutes). It ends with a flaming Old Grey Whistle Test set booked on a lark, another missed chance at a DVD extra. By the May John Peel session at the top of disc 3, which opens with a coruscating, smoldering “White Light/White Heat,” the Spiders from Mars are ablaze, all rocket fuel and gravity defiance. Finally – the music we know.

A sleepier but still-strong session for something called The Johnnie Walker Lunchtime Show is most notable for the appearance of “Space Oddity,” which our man had moved light years beyond. On the May and June radio broadcasts in the wake of Ziggy’s release, the material is stripped of its frosting – the frills make the album, but there’s plenty of reward in hearing the Spiders bite into these terrific tunes so ravenously. After all of that repetition, we get a tantalizing taste of something else on disc 4, session outtakes which include a rousing if incompatible version of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” a perked-up stab at The Man Who Sold the World’s “Superman,” the oblique, alluring “Holy Holy,” and the Todd Hayes-accredited outtake “Velvet Goldmine,” which maybe should’ve made it.

VIDEO: Bowie producer Ken Scott on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Star! box set

Further into the disc are the single versions of “Starman” and the seminal “John, I’m Only Dancing” – handy for completists, I suppose – and a live set at the Boston Music Hall that offers an example of the fabled real-time transformations from antique to futureshock. Then onto disc 5 and its other mixes, among which we finally get the great, lost “Sweet Head”. But why didn’t the compilers of this set squeeze the original mix into the outtakes disc? And where is Bowie’s cover of “Amsterdam,” not present in any mix? There’s more than enough room here; the incompleteness is maddening given the heft and price. This isn’t one of those Miles Davis history-trip sets, where the familiar work is gloriously elaborated – it’s a confection, an Xmas indulgence for lifelong lovers of a stone classic.

There are certainly some intriguing curios on disc 5 – plodding ballad “Shadow Man”; folky stomp “It’s Gonna Rain Again”; the listenable version of “Looking for a Friend,” valiantly tried and ditched; a Trident studios first go at the Château d’Hérouville “I Can’t Explain,” livelier and less interesting than the Pinups version; “Lady Stardust” an octave lower (huge mistake!). At the tail end is one of those “why?” remixes of “Moonage Daydream, stripped of its vocals. Admittedly, the silence after the first stabs of electric guitar is thrilling; admittedly, everything on this disc sounds top notch. I looked for a friend with a Blu-Ray and found one, and the ‘03 5.1 mix of the album proper is certainly sumptuous. But it reminds one that part of the original’s charm lies in its slight sonic imperfection.

The putative prize, and the 2024 David Bowie Record Store Day entry, is an “alternate Ziggy,” Waiting in the Sky, taken from a ¼” tape made in December 1971 (wild to realize Ziggy was almost in the can when Hunky Dory came out), before “Starman,” “Suffragette City,” or “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” existed. Would you prefer a Ziggy Stardust without “Starman,” “Suffragette City,” or “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”? No, but it’s interesting, like programming what-if Beatles LPs. Bowie was a great enough artist to deserve massive, pricey, silver-foil testaments – a great enough artist to keep them fascinating, delightful even. But they’ll never be as monumental as a $5.98 LP in a beguiling cardboard sleeve, which dropped from space over half a century ago, and changed the face of this planet for good.

Author
Recent Posts

Ryan Maffei

Ryan Maffei is a freelance writer, musician and actor in the Dallas area. He was a member of the lost punk group Hot Lil Hands and the lost pop group the Pozniaks. He loves the Go-Betweens and was lucky enough to write liner notes for their box sets.