Ziggy Stardust & The Search For God

Refractions on David Bowie's iconic album "Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars"

Happy Birthday to ZIGGY STARDUST & THE SPIDER FROM MARS, the landmark album by David Bowie, released today in 1972. At that time I was already obsessed with Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Inspired by the film “2001,” Bowie’s 1969 astronaut story introduced the character of Major Tom.

The grandiose chord changes and Rick Wakeman’s Mellotron work framed Tom’s loneliness in a vast universe, and this spoke to my own loneliness. Back then Bowie followers thought “Space Oddity” was a Hamlet-like study, that Tom was a fatalist. However, Bowie never said Tom died. All he said was “tell my wife I love her very much...” (a motif Bowie borrowed from “New York Mining Disaster” by The Bee Gees). Bowie reprised Tom in future songs, portraying the spaceman’s conflicted spiritual quest

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I was 14 years old when a new Bowie album caught my eye, seeming to extend from “Space Oddity.” Sight unheard, I bought the “Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders from Mars” album. Today it’s routinely proclaimed as one of rock music’s greatest works, and it inspired hundreds of musicians into writing songs and starting bands. I wore it out for a week. One my school pals wore it out the second week. Then he loaned it to his girlfriend and she wore it out for two weeks. Then half the kids in town had a love/hate reaction to it. “Ziggy” was totally unexpected and a bit controversial.

The “Ziggy” story line followed an androgynous bisexual alien sent as a savior to a dystopian Earth, but he succumbs to his own ego and becomes an ill-fated narcissistic rock star, a “leper messiah” signifying the artficiality of drugs, fame, politics, and sexual orientation. It was assumed “Ziggy Stardust” was intended as concept album or rock opera, but the story was actually an afterthought.

The thread started in 1970 when Bowie formed a 4-piece band to record the cerebral hard rock album, “Man Who Sold The World.” Then he changed record labels and went into a softer, singer-songwriter mode with “Hunky Dory” featuring the single “Changes” and songs informed by Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, poets, theatre, and sci-fi. The band was augmented by Rick Wakeman, playing a piano once used by The Beatles. Bowie re-named the band Spiders From Mars and asked Wakeman to join, but he declined, citing an offer to join the band Yes.

Spiders From Mars became a very tight band, and star guitarist Mick Ronson pumped up their sound, but the “Hunky Dory” songs were not suited for live performance, a dilemma I’ve run into with my own recordings. They needed music easy to replicate onstage, so they recorded odd covers by Chuck Berry, Jacquel Brel, Velvet Underground, and Americana singer-songwriter Ron Davies, then added an abundance of originals influenced by Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson, Little Richard, T. Rex, gospel, jazz, and British mod, directly quoting The Small Faces in “Sufragette City.” Bowie and the Spiders ordered their tracks to fit a new blueprint, adding the catchy power pop anthem “Starman” for the single. The album was finished and the character of Ziggy stayed for two years.

The Ziggy persona was a composite of Marc Bolan, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and Vince Taylor, the English singer who’d had a mental breakdown and thought he was half-alien and half-Christ. Bowie identified Ziggy with Jung-ian neologisms and Gnostic syzygy. Add glitter and outrageous fashions and Ziggy, “a character like someone from Mars,” was born. Bowie had been creating characters and personas since “Space Oddity.” In his late 60s denim hippie psychedelic folkie phase, he was performing as a solo acoustic act and was once booed off a festival stage. This happened the week his father died, adding to pre-existing stress he had from mental illness in his family. He said that stage personas shielded and protected him from crisis onstage and off.

At that point I had no real stage experience, and going around in glitter clothes and big shiny boots in the backwater town I lived in was out of the question, but I related to the personas. Not long after, The Who described multiple personalities in their “Quadrophenia” rock opera, and I was totally with the program. Personas were an identity within an identity, switchable at any time, and it was instructive, especially since my self-image was a mess. My personas would manifest as psychological compartmentalizing.

That included my own compartmentalizing with God, and “Ziggy” had “God Songs”: “Starman” was obviously a Christ figure, and “Soul Love” quoted the “flaming dove” from the baptism of Christ in John 1:32-33. We've all been distracted by Messianic figures who start off one way and end up as another, like dress rehearsals for the Second Coming of Christ but gone haywire. Cases in point are the characters of Ziggy Stardust and The Wizard of Oz, hearkened in one of Bowie’s greatest songs, the power pop anthem “Starman”—please enjoy my cover of it.

Bowie was fascinated with the occult and religion, which would peak years later when he was working on the film THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. One night in his trailer, in the midst of a mental breakdown, he claimed a “born again” experience helped him to turn his life around, and in a strange way, the story of Ziggy Stardust motivated me to seek the real God.

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