David Bowie’s 'Ziggy Stardust' (Part 1): Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. My name is Jordan Runt Tug and I am the naz with God given ass Yes you are. And in case that hint doesn't clue you in, today we're focusing on something very near and dear to both of our hearts and many others as well. Uh you know, of all the pop culture monoliths we've examined on this show so far, I'm probably hard pressed the name one that has such a special place in people's hearts. With the possible exception of Baby Got Back. To call this one of the most influential albums in history is under selling it a little bit from my perspective. More important than all the trails that it blazed across music, fashion, performance, art, and visual design, it's provided encouragement to generations of people who felt out of step or other. In so many cases, this album gave people the strength to embrace their inner freak and unapologetically be themselves. Just like the man who made it. I'm talking about David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which turns fifty years old this week. Hi go in our stairway to have an episode. You talked about Chuck Closterman's theory that every guy, or at least a certain type of guy, goes through a led Zeppelin phase, and I'd argue that most artistically inclined sensitive people that I know I went through a Ziggy star Dust phase at one time or another, did you, um? You know? I was a total dilettante until I until basically my mid twenties. I mean I had changes because that was what my dad had the greatest hits, um, and I loved it. I don't know what I was, you know, I was an idiot. I was like, I love all this, I will not investigate further, like like a total dummy. These are some of my favorite songs. I'm sure there's nothing else out there. So it wasn't until my mid twenties that I started really getting into like Scary Monsters and the Berlin Trilogy and like, you know, just the mass of Bowie and I didn't really check out until nineties, like him, um, and I think it was when he died that it just sort of crystallized, like i'ed up because he came through Pennsylvania. I had all these opportunities to see him and I didn't, And it was like, you know, really watching all the tributes roll in and seeing people right so movingly about what he meant to them that I was like, oh, yes, yes, he is an al teimer and I whiffed this. I whipped my fandom. So yeah, late blooming Bowie fan, but very much one still. That's so funny you mentioned that for somebody who is into music as you are and I am, I had almost the exact same experience. My exposure to Bowie was really weird because there was such a cult around him in my high school and you know, in the early two thousands, and to me, he just became like another T shirt artist, which was like just somebody that you liked, and it said more about who you wanted to portray yourself as rather than actually liking this artist. And it was just become like a sort of fashion signifier, like the Dark Side of the Moon logo or the Grateful Dead Bears at my high school. And as a result, I really delayed in listening to all those artists for reasons that I really can't articulate. It was a sense of, like, I mean, the classic rock industrial complex kind of ruins this stuff. Yeah, and it's because it's hard they find it on your own. It's just like ambiently in the air so much that you're like, oh, I know, I know all there is, like I've heard those songs a million times. I know about them, and then you don't because you're an idiot in your seventeen So it's like, yeah, but no, I'm with you. And so do you remember when he died? Were we working? Were you? We were both the people when he died, right, No, it was just before I got there. Actually, this is really weird. Bowie kind of popped up in my life in a really weird way. The first Rolling Stone piece I was ever asked to write was the day Bowie died. Um and that. Yeah, it was a strange mix of like, oh my god, this is terrible and oh my god, him rolling for Rolling Stone, like any kid who grew up watching Almost Famous, was a dream come true. So he's just always kind of been this strange presence that's popped up in my life almost like that episode of Flight of the Concourse. He was just I had this friend who would describe Bob Dylan's work to another friend who wasn't really into him at the time, was when you're ready to receive Bob, he will make himself known to you. And that's how I sort of feel about Bowie. He always kind of popped up. Yeah, the day he died was really the day that I started diving into him in a serious way actually for that piece. And then a few years later the folks at My Heart asked me to write a biography podcast about him. This is a shameless plug for that. It's off the record David Bowie and it's it's fourteen hours long. It took up a year of my life. Um, Jordan went insane while he was writing this. I was in touch with him the entire time and it was worth it. Well, thanks so good. It's it's fourteen hours long and it was written from April twenty to May one, so the peak dark days of the pandemic and Bowie, Um, in addition to sort of driving me insane, also got me through these really tough days. So I I feel in a funny way that I've gotten to know him, and I've become extremely fond of him ever since. And um, you know, for that project, it interviewed so many fans and artists who worked with him, and they really Bowie people are like some of the best fans I've ever known, just the biggest hearts and yeah, so that really was just such a cool experience. So um yeah, Bowie people all the best, and I hope we do them proud with uh with this episode, which you know, Bowie broke so many boundaries and defied so many expectations. So in keeping with that same bold spirit of innovation, we're delivering our very first two part too much information episode exactly. We really hope you enjoy it. From the eccentric, reclusive rock stars who inspired the character of Ziggy, to the legendary piano used on the setons, the funny connection between Starman and the Wizard of Oz, and the moment Freddie Mercury stood front row center for Ziggy's grand unveiling. Here's part one of everything you never knew about Ziggy, Stardust and the spiders from Mars Spot. I can't do spiders, I'm going to please. Yeah, the webs from all spiders catching things get in there he'd saw it. Oh boy, it'll come up again. Oh I'm sure it will organically. So it's early nineteen seventy one and David Bowie is at a cross roads. We have to start every episode impossible with the artists at a cross roads. He's been trying to break into the music business since nineteen sixty five, which a lot of people don't realize. He put in the work and he's changed his musical poses again and again to adapt to the prevailing tastes and trends of the time, starting with early mod style R and B groups in the mid sixties with names like the Mannished Boys and the king Bees, which are both named for Blue Standards. And he dropped his self titled debut album in nineteen sixty seven on the same day the Beatles dropped Sergeant Pepper, and they both have a similar yeah yeah, talk about getting the cliffs um and they both had this sort of similar psychedelic carnival music hall feel. And by nineteen nine he'd entered into his freak folk troubadour phase with stuff like Space Oddity, where he cashed in on the Apollo eleven moon landing, and that brought him to like the closest he ever come to having a hit, really uh. And then by the dawn of the seventies he teamed up with guitarist Mick Ronson and amped up his sounds sort of like led Zeppelin the Who for the album The Man Who Sold the World, which flopped spectacularly upon its release, despite being a really sort of FM friendly sound with that heavy rock and roll um. This is a super broad overview and a gross over simplification of Bowie's over Bowie's cannon to this point, but by night seventy one very much looked like he was destined to be a one hit wonder on par with you know, Zagger and Evans or Barry McGuire in terms of like late sixties slander, Barry McGuire moody, doomy apocalyptic songs. And then he can see the alien alter ego Ziggy And this would not have happened were it not for two trips literal not chemical trips that he took this year nine one to America. It is such a shame that Man Who Sold the World flopped because that record is like a sneaky It's a sneaky contender for one of his most influential. Obviously, the big thing off of it is the title track because Nirvana covered it. But yeah, man, it's a bummer. I remember the band I was in when he died. We got invited to do like two songs at a tribute set, and we did Suffragette City, which killed. But then we did black black country Rock because such a killer riff that we were just like, we were so into that and it went over like the proverbial lead balloon. People were just like, this is a Bowie song. So I have a soft spot for man Who's old the world. That is a great record. It's one that's so unexpected. I mean, especially when hurt against Hunky Dorry, which came next, which is like a McCartney solo record. It's all piano based. But yeah, incredible album. So David Bowie may have been English. The ziggy Stardust was born in America. In many ways, the United States was David Bowie's spiritual home. It's gleefully excessive, larger than life, and filled with contradiction. I could say the same about Bowie. You could be whoever you wanted the United States. I think that was really what differentiated it. From the UK at this time, and this place had mesmerized David since he was a little boy. I mean, growing up in England, all culture was American, you know, I mean from Disney movies, Hamburgers, Coca Cola, Elvis. It just seemed like America's chief export was pop culture. So his first trip to the United States in February nineteen seventy one was a big deal. And fittingly it was in Hollywood, the land of make believe and movie stars, where anything seemed possible, that the Ziggy Startus notion really began to take root, and he sketched early notes for it on Hotel Stationary and cocktail Napkins. And initially the Ziggy start Us idea was conceived as a Broadway style production and the score was going to serve as a new album. And this is because, from Bowie's perspective, rock and roll had become by one really dull, and he felt that it embraced showmanship but not theatricality. And despite the recent spade of rock operas like The Who's Tommy and the Pretty Things, s F Sorrow and Arthur by the Kinks, he thought that all the other elements like clothes and set design and lights and dance moves and acting were all treated as secondary to the music if they were attended to it all, and David wanted to incorporate all of these things. And he'd recently caught a performance by Alice Cooper, who was sort of the new gender bending shock rocker on the scene at the time, and he was extremely not impressed by the whole electric chair, straight jacket bow constrictor routine. In fact, he later said that he felt embarrassed for Alice because he basically seemed like so much of a try hard. Yeah, he said, it's a quote. I think he's trying to be outrageous, David said at the time. You can see him, poor dear, with his red eye sticking out and his temples straining. He tried so hard. I find him very demeaning. It's also premeditated. That is rich comings from Bowie, by the way, but I would just like to take issue with that for a number of reasons. One, while Alice Cooper is pretty firmly lodged in the popular consciousness for like the decapitated baby stick and the shock rocker things sort of being this Marilyn Manson precursor a lot of the early press around him that Bowie would have been reading around this time centered around the gender stuff, the naming convention of naming this band. And by the way, his early band was called the Spiders, So spiders um the Spiders count stands yeah, dan um. They talked about this all the time. John Mendelssohn and Entertainment World, who would also go and write about Bowie, said of Alice Cooper, he looked like a nightmare vision of unisex run a muck um in life. In nineteen seventy one, there was an article starring him called rock in the Androgenous Zone Um. Also from that year, in Crawdaddy there was an article called Alice Cooper, Are you a boy or are you a girl? Uh? In the in Milwaukee Journal there was one called Alice Cooper of Freaky Rock Fame is just an all American boy girl and he's been really written out, I think, and it's I you know. As early as nineteen sixty nine, he was saying in a magazine called Popping, people don't accept that they're both male and female, and people are afraid to break out of their sex thing because that's a big insecurity that's doing that. So I think I just want to give some shouts to Alice Cooper, and I think Bowie slamming him is Bowie trying to distance himself from someone who, as with many other people, he would promptly rip off. That's my iles, Cooper stick, thank you for coming to my ted talk. Thank you for that stirring defense. Also, those records slap. So this l A trip was in February n and in September of that same year, Bowie travel to America again to sign his new deal with r C A Records, And this label was home to Elvis Pressley, who was Bowie's birthday twin in addition to being you know, the king of rock and roll, and he saw himself as the heir to the king's throne and all in all, this trip to New York was a big deal for Bowie and he had some new friends that he wanted to meet in town, the cast of a very very very off Broadway show called Pork. Hi. I'll tell us about park I I want you to really well, they don't teach pork and drama school. Uh. It has been described somewhat uncharitably but not inaccurately as an orgy with artie dialogue. Script had been heavy scare quotes written by Andy Warhol cold from over two hundred plus hours of recorded foam conversations with the factory kids and who are also in the cast. And this was a really such a common thing around this time. I mean, that's whole lou Reid's whole thing was just jotting down stuff that he heard around the factory and making it into songs. And it's very hand in hand with Andy Warhol's literally factory like industrial approach to art, like, well, we gotta make a play now, I've got all these conversations laying around. This is now the play. We have a play anyway. Uh, these are just some of the wildest people alive in this They talk about it extensively in Please Kill Me, which is the punk oral history, just flashing their boobs during performances. Uh. The plot of this thing has full frontal nudity, masturbation, homosexuality, douching on stage, simulated coprophagia with chocolate putting subd in is the real thing. I felt dirty just reading that. Uh. The run lasted a scant few weeks in the heady summer of ninete but somehow they got an offered to perform in England, which is like the English was lost in the country. The English didn't know. It was probably just the Warhol thing, right, they were like the English didn't know it hit him. An actress flashed reporters outside of the Queen's Palace. Other cast members were busted having sex in the bathroom of a pub. Yeah, that tracks. It seemed only natural that such free spirited attention seekers would find their way to Bowie. In fact, they were some of the few Americans who actually knew who he was. They had read David's first major profile and Rolling Stone earlier that year, and they were intrigued by the photos of David looking very indrogynous in his long hair and quote man dress. So it reminds me of this anecdote about Iggy Pop where he his lawyer came and picked him up from jail, like out of the drunk tank or whatever, and he was wearing a dress and he enters the cell and he goes, he why are you wearing a woman's dress? And Iggy pulls himself up and like dust himself off, and he says, I beg your pardon. This is a man's dress and walks out. Yeah. So this cast of the Warhol factory freaks they hit England, they decided to look up Bowie and uh, you put this akin to uh what's her name from the basis of legally blonde writing all of her stuff on pink paper. Like, if you put yourself out there, the right people will find you the most, be the most authentically you, and it will track the right people and the right kind of attention, and you will be seen for exactly who you are. I think this is another great example of that. And this next anecdote will undo everything that you just said, because they were not impressed with David Bowie and the version of himself he was at the time. He was kind of in this transitional folky phase. He was wearing baggy pants, his big hat and doing an acoustic set. And I think the quote from one of the Warhol scensters was they loved Angela because she was like pregnant and like behaving really outrageously, and then she was American and so she had that kind of like Yeah, I I interviewed a few of these factory people, Cherry Vanilla and Tony Zanetta, and they both had the same thing that David. I think the word they used was kind of a drip, like very quiet, and I mean because he was a shy guy. I mean, that's the thing that they would always remark on was he had the capacity kind of like Marilyn Monroe to just turn it on and everyone in the room would just turn their head to him when he didn't do anything, you know, perceptively, but just his whole energy would change. But he could also just completely disappear if he wanted to also, So yeah, that's kind of what they said, is he was in this kind of awkward phase stylistically and you know, fashion wise, but also they kind of got him in a shy, shy mode. But it's just it's funny because they go see David's concert and they're just thoroughly not impressed by this kind of folky drip that they see on the stage, and then they invite him to go see their play, and you know, it's like Leonardo DiCaprio and Titanic, like want to go to a real party, and then he sees everything you described on stage from you know, homosexuality on stage, douching, et cetera, and this completely shattered his mind because it had only been three or four years since there had been a censor board that had to approve all plays that were performed in England. I mean, so this was just you know, it was just four years after homosexuality had been criminalized. I mean, that's what we're working with here. Yeah, And the kind of gritty urban grossness that they represented was like a long time obsession for him. And he read the beat poetry, he read the care Act novels, he loved Velvet Underground and so to see this seriously underground stuff suddenly performed on stage, especially after David had spent so much of his youth, you know, reading all the beat poets and Caro Wakin as you mentioned Velvet Undergrounds music and uh, you know John Ricci's City of Night and stuff like that. This completely blew his mind. So he went to see Pork repeatedly and got close with the cast, and in fact, within a year many of them would be on his payroll. Essentially. The other thing that he got from them was the notion of being on, always be closing, always be on um. So Jane County would later say, we kind of took David under our wing and we all decided to help him out, you know, glam him up and make him more outrageous. Um. We can quibble over whether or not over their role. I know some of these factory types are great reverse rememberers. Yeah, they do resent him because a lot of their slang expressions and stuff would show up in his song lyrics, and he did borrow a lot from them. But their influence on him and has you know, it's been kind of overstated a little bit, yes in Europe saying no, I don't know, okay, So I'm just going from the police kill me thing, because Jane County does talk about she fronted this proto punk band called the Electric Chairs and they were sort of the also rans of the Maxis, Kansas City and CBGB scene, Like they were this really wild band but never really caught on in the same way that a lot of the other peers from that scene did. Um. And she has been very adamant about her influence on Bowie, you know, she says, and please kill me. David loved my songs and so I sent him my demos. He loved them and wanted more, so I sent him three sets of demos, man enough to be a woman. Are you a boy? Or are you a girl? Queen age baby? Uh, he wanted to take me into the studio and produce an album, so I sent all my music and little bits and pieces started showing up on his albums. So her words. So the cast maids obviously understating this somewhat, but Pork made quite the impression on David, and so when he gets to New York, he decides to look them up and with them Andy Warhol. Yeah, it's kind of inevitable that the cast of Pork brought David to Warhol's factory to meet Andy himself. And you know, you think of it now, this could have been one of the great artistic summits of the seventies, but it was pretty awkward and painful. Uh. This was just a few years after to the assassination attempt on Warhol's life in and security at the factory had been ramped up, and the vibes were really bad. Um he had to ring a doorbell marked do not ring, and then Bowie and his sort of small entourage were grilled by Andy's guards. Just bad vibes, and when Andy finally appeared, he was for some reason Claude and Jodpur's high laced boots and a writing crop um, which I'm sure added to the weird vibes. And yeah, much like Alice Cooper, David was not impressed with any Warhol. He would later recall, I met this man who was the living dead, yellow and complexion, a wig on that was the wrong color, little glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired. So I thought, this guy doesn't like flesh. Obviously he's reptilian, and it's a weird thing to say. Yeah, I mean, neither man were known for being especially chatty, and Warhol just completely thwarted any attempts to make small talk. And this was just kind of his way. He was just not the most socially tactful person. But David took it really personally, you know, he wanted to be taken seriously by Warhol as a peer, and so he viewed this as rejection. And so David tried to break the ice by playing a new song he'd written and he'd recorded, but it wasn't out yet, called Andy Warhol, which would be on Hunky Dory, and he played it for Andy, played it for the you know, the man who inspired it, and Warhol listened for a minute before sort of absolutely wandering away. And then a few minutes later one of the factory flunkeys came over and informed David that Andy hated the song that he named for him, which is amazing. I mean, I guess the only thing that Warhol actually liked about Bowie were the bright yellow patent leather shoes that he had on, and he was so intrigued that he grabbed the polaroid and just began photographing the shoes obsessively inches away from the shoes and not even making eye contact with David, which is incredible. And before David left, he took part in one of war Halls famous screen tests, where guests are placed in front of a camera and encouraged to do whatever comes to mind. It's basically a video portrait, and David, who had this extensive background in mime, acted out his own disembowelment, just ripping his guts out bit by bit. You can see this on YouTube. I think it's on YouTube. I've seen it before. It might be this in a documentary, but yeah, this disembowlment, as far as he was concerned, that was kind of a physical manifestation of what this visit was like for him. Can you imagtion being one of the like lesser known factory flunkey's who's almost assuredly on acid at this point, and like this is the scene that you're confronted with, Like this tall alien looking stranger comes in, plays Andy Warhol a song about Andy Warhol and then has his shoes obsessively photographed and then acts out his own disembolvement. I mean that would put me off drugs for the rest of my life. I mean, think about being the one who had to go in form Bowie that Andy hated his song. I mean that's arguably worse. So that's true. All in all, this meeting with Warhol kind of a bust, but thankfully things went slightly better when David met another Warhol's associates, Mr lou Reid. I love Louis. I mean he's such a cantankerous especially around this point of his life, oh big time. I mean, yeah, this is this was the period when lou Is basically uh in a self imposed state of exile from music and living out on Long Island with his parents and I think working on it as a typist in his father's aunt. Yeah, so so yeah, not a great time to meet lou Reid, I suppose, but Bowie was thrilled because this is just one of his heroes and it's interesting. Bowie got past an advanced copy of The Velvet Underground's debut back in nineteen sixty six, becoming probably one of the very first people, if not the first person in England to ever hear it. His manager at the time had brought it back over during a business trip in New York and Bowie just devoured the album. I mean, this was like Caro wax Books put some music and he incorporated a few of the Velvet Underground songs into his early set I mean, definitely, making him the first person in England to cover stuff like Waiting for the Man in White Light, White Heat. And Bowie had visited New York on his first trip to America earlier that year. The same trip, he went to l a and he made a point to go see The Velvet Underground downtown and after the show, he snuck backstage and cornered the guy that he thought was lou Reid and just fan boyd out and after it was all over, he learned that the guy that he'd been fawning over was not Lou read it was lou Reid's replacement. Doug Yule Okay, though easy mistake to make, and in fact one that I made when I was first downloading Velvet Underground songs off because because Doug Yule's whole thing at this point was trying to sound he idolized Lou. When he came into the band and sings his he is a better version of lou Reid's vocals, like oh sweet nothing, he's like his That is such a beautiful performance, and he sounds like Lou if you read about them. At this time, he had also started dressing like Lu and they sort of look they're both just like you know, mousey brunette guys. So I was like, this is before the internet. You don't know what lou Reid looks like. You see a guy who sounds like him, and you're seeing the Velvet Underground. I made the same mistake, David. Okay, well remember this incident, because the whole sense of stardom is just what people think you are. Mentality comes back later in the Ziggy Started story. But now Bowie is sharing a meal with the real Lou Reid, who again is just sort of a shadow of his former self at this point. But what do they bond over? They bond over um not really caring much for Andy Warhol. That was really I mean, Lou during this dinner was kind of drunken, sullen, but the only time he brightened was when Bowie told him about this really awkward meeting with Warhol. And Warhol was famously the Velvet Undergrounds very hands off manager for a time, and Lu joked that the Velvet Underground considered producing an Andy Warhol doll that had a string and when you pulled the string, nothing happened. So but at this point, another massively important American in Bowie's life comes in, and that is Mr Jim Osterberg a k A Iggy Pop. Uh Lu decides to call it an early night, heads back to Long Island to his cloistered life of misery and uh but Iggy Pop shows up at maxis Kansas City, and Bowie was a big fan of Egging the Stooges. He cited him as his favorite singer in interviews, but more than the songwriting, it was the Iggy Pop persona that captivated him, and honestly, how could you not. There is this amazing bit Henry Rawlins does about his like long running feud with Iggy Pop that is completely one sided. He just when Rollins band was like a thing, he was like, um, his band was like a thing. No, No Rollins band, Rawlins band, his band Africa. Yeah, I know. So he has this. He has this very funny bit where he talks about, um, he basically got blown off stage by Iggy Pop, and so he then made it his as everyone did. Yeah, and so he made it his mission to like train as physically hard as he could and like rehearse the band as much as he could to try and defeat Iggy Pop. And and he just he has great quote, Yeah exactly what it is, but he it's his masterful thing. It's on YouTube. You gotta look it up. There's two bits in it. I love. One is he says, you know, there's Jim and there's Iggy and Jim is just a nice guy from Ipsilanti, Michigan, like, oh hey, how you doing and real nice to see a great gig And then there's Iggy Pop and he's like, and you never know who you're gonna get until or you know who you're gonna get when it hits the stage. He talks about like seeing the stooges of the band, whoever the band was at this point, like vamping on down in the street, and like seeing of Rhadi holding a mic out at arms length from backstage, like as far from the mic is physically possible, and seeing he comes sprinting for backstage, grabbing the mic and just like immediately start bleeding and like already shirtless and sweating, and he goes this whole thing about they played some festival and Iggy just like destroyed the stage and he invites the crowd up on there and um, it's just just show stopping, complete catastrophe, brings the whole festival halt rock and rolling carnet, and he walks past Henry Rawlins, who had played before him. He walks past Henry Rawlins like Trot's off stage, and as he's passing Henry Rawlins, he looks and he goes, huh, soggy pop rock and rolling carnet. Um, but he's in a he's at a crossroads. He's at a crossroads like Bowie and on someone's couch. You know. The Stooges were never destined to be a They were a sprint, not a marathon. UM. The band split. Iggy was on Heroin, extremely on Heroin. The odeed, he crashed the van, he was stranded in the Detroit projects at one point wearing a Ink two two, and by the summer of seventy one, he was crashing at his ex manager's New York City apartment, and that is where he was on this very night when he got the call to come meet Bowie at Max's. But he had no idea who Bowie was, and he was watching a Jimmy Stewart movie on TV, so he was busy and also on Heroin. Uh so he was finally persuaded to come down and meet Bowie and they just hit it off. And why shouldn't they. They're both these quiet, intelligent, semi retiring guys in their private lives who became these larger than life rock icons. UM. I would also like to point out the other big New York formative punk influence on Bowie around this time, which is the New York Dolls. Um, especially in the gender bending department. UM. You know, the New York Dolls kind of gets cited as like an early like the seventy seven kind of crew of punk. But they were really going around this time, and they were playing in all of these downtown spots and uh, I think it's in Please Kill Me Again that Lee Childers. Uh says that Bowie and Reid came to see them a lot this time, and their whole thing was like it was like proto punk, stripped down rock and roll, and they were just a bunch of huge, ungainly men in drag on stage. So all of the load stars of New York City rock and roll are kind of converging on Bowie. At this point. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So you have these two trips the United States. You know, if you think about the trip to Hollywood in February seventy one, that provided the star dust, the whole like you know, dramatic on stage element, and then this trip to New York that was the Ziggy, that was the you know, as we mentioned later, a lot of people theorized that Ziggy was Eggy with a Z. But more on that later. So David gets back to England in the early fall of seventy one and it begins to assemble his own custom made superstar Ziggy Stardust, and he holds up in his own version of Andy Warhol's factory, this giant, decrepit gothic manor house called Hadden Hall that he rents with his wife Angie and little son Zoe, and his bandmates who would become the Spiders from Mars Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Boulder, and drummer Woody Woodman. Z Guy's name, Yeah, I know, it's really hard to say. The most British ever? Sorry who Woodman? And this whole custom made superstar notion was derived in large part from Andy Warhol, who was a painter who branched out into film and music, and he incorporated all these mediums into large scale happenings with a capital H, which were really some of the first full scale multimedia events. And David wanted to go even further. And his idea was that his performance would become concept art. He wouldn't just exhibit a fantasy, he would inhabit that fantasy. And getting out there and singing songs to him was just boring. He felt that people didn't want to recital, they wanted to show, and Bowie promised deliver this full package, and he had this great quote around this time, I'm the last person to pretend that I'm a radio I'd rather go out and be a color television set. Such a great line. And to explore this bold new concept, David decided to experiment on someone else, and this was another page right out of Warhol's playbook. He would create a superstar from scratch, and the band would be his canvas. David would write the songs, choose the clothes, picked their new names, and even provide the vocals. And it's really kind of a canny move because without risking his own career, middling as it was at this time, David could experiment to his heart's content and discard the ideas that didn't work and cherry picked the ones that did for himself. And to continue the whole you know space metaphor, it's like NASA testing early rockets with dogs and apes um. That's a terrible metaphor, and this one's even worse. For Bowie's personal ape, he recruited the the handsome and charismatic Freddie BARRETTI sorry Freddy for comparing you to nape um A nineteen year old budding clothing designer that Bowie knew from London's gay club scene, and David re christened Freddy Varretti as Rudy Valentino and steered him into the studio with a kind of ragtag group of musicians that Bowie called Arnold Corns. That was the name of this band. I guess it's a terrible name. Is supposedly taken from his love of the Pink Floyd song Arnold Lane, But yeah, terrible, terrible band name. Now in the annals of rock and roll history, the band Arnold Corne's seldom gets to mention, and this is really not surprising. They released just two singles between v two, both of which are mediocre and both of which sank like stones on the charts. But despite their total lack of commercial success, and they're truly her endous name, Alcorn's deserves recognition because they were the prototype for Ziggy Startust. Uh. The guy that Bowie hired to be the frontman's Freddie Bretty, he couldn't sing to save his life, so David went full Milli Vanilli and secretly sang on recordings of two of his new songs, moon Age day Dream and Hang Onto Yourself, both of which were destined for greatness on the Rise and Fall of Ziggy starred us on the Spiders from Mars album. But these early versions with Arnold Corns they needed a lot of work. The tempos were kind of sluggish and the vocal performances. I think the keys were wrong and he sounded really kind of thin and ready. It wasn't a good performance. So aunod Corn's commercial flop, but by no means a failure, because it allowed Bowie to toy with alter egos and high concept pop and now he was ready to give it a shot on his own. But there was a problem. What was that problem? The problem is David had just wrapped Hunky Dory, which is still a month out from being released. This is your favorite Bowie record because it's piano heavy, right, Yeah? I mean well I like a lot of the the Berlin stuff too. Yeah. I say this is god This is the most McCartney esque fair But they didn't fit his vision of this multimedia spectacle um and it also sort of didn't rock. You don't get the crowd on their feet with you know that, there's no there's no star man, there's no, you know, five years on this it's yeah, but our c A has sucked money into it. But I guess they did. They say that they didn't hear a hint on this, or they just said, we want in the studio, we want more. God love him. So he returns to the studio to tackle basically a backlog of songs that he has before Hunky Dories even out Yeah, which is you know, under the Sway of Stooges Velvet Underground. And he told his producer Ken Scott, I don't think you'll like this next album. It's much more rock and roll. Um, you know the other big I don't know if he's an unsung hero. He's pretty much a sung hero. But you know, Mick Ronson is like the envy the other the non Bowie m v P category of this era. I mean's his musical director. Basically, that guitar sound is I mean, that guitar sound is so influential. They have created a pedal that just lets you replicate what he did with his wah pedal, which was do you know about this it's like halfway up right? Yeah. They call it the cocked wah sound. I mean, I know, hell um, the What a wall pedal does is it sweeps through a frequency range. Right, if you leave it in a certain position on this heel to toe spectrum, it'll stay as a sort of frequency mid range boost. And you know, Ronson I think is playing a less Paul, which is traditionally a bit more of a bassy guitar, and so he parks his wall in this mid position. And what that does is because it's really mid range, e honk and bite to it, and it is it's it's become like just an archetypal. I mean, you go, you can go to his studio and be like, I want that mcronson sound. And so there is now a pedal that I think electro harmonics is created that is called the cocked WAW or some kind of cock name, and there's a rooster on it, and uh, it just lets you get that loss sound with a one button pedal. So he's just a tremendously influential guy. And as you mentioned the musical director, these sessions start at London's tried in studios in November. Um Bowie gets bored so quickly two or three takes to learn a new song before he would say no, it's not working and move on. Producer Ken Scott's of these vocals are all first takes, which is wild. And uh Ronson finished his charts in the bathroom usually like ten minutes before they reslated to record, because they run that much of a time crunch. And that's and that's why this I mean, yeah, it's a live sounding record. It's a raw sounding record. It does not sound like musical. It doesn't sound like cabaret. It sounds like sweat work. And now Jordan's piano sidebar. Speaking of cabaret, this is not a very piano centric album, unlike Hunky Dory, but I wanted to give a quick shout out to the piano at the studios that they were using Trident Studios, because it's arguably one of the most important instruments in rock. It's a Beckstein concert size grand piano and it was used on the Beatles Hey, Jude, Elton John's your song Tiny Dancer and Leave On, Harry Nilsen's cover of Bad Fingers Without You. Queen's first three albums, including Killer Queen and The Seven Seas of Rye Least, Carly Simon's You're So Vain, another one, Loving us the right thing to do, Lou Reid's Transformer album probably best heard on Perfect Day, another mention, Bowie's classics like Life on Mars and Changes another one plus George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, super Tramps, Crime of the Century, early Genesis albums, and so many more. And what has become of this instrument? You may ask, Well, this, this, this prais my heart. While the piano was being moved, the cradle that was supporting it broke, and this priceless instrument tumbled into the basement of the studio and had to be rebuilt permanently, altering it sounds and um. That was sold at auction in May, but the details of the price and purchaser have never been made public, although its rumored to have been sold for between three hundred and four and a thousand pounds around four hundred and six hundred grand and American dollars. Uh. Somewhere out there is a piece of rock and roll history, And as I say in every episode, it belongs in a museum. You know, if you ever think you're having a bad damn word, imagine being the guy you have piano god, oh man, I mean, you can tell I mean, it's just such a distinctive sound. I mean, think about those Elton John records, think about I mean Life on Mars. I mean it definitely, that's such a sound of like early seventies FM rock. It's yah God. Anyway. One of my favorite tracks on Ziggy Stardust is moon Age day Dream, specifically because I love the unusual Sacks recorder duet on the solo. And I always thought that was just Bowie being weird. Yeah, I always thought that was just Bowie being weird. But apparently it has a precedent. Uh. He apparently took the idea or borrowed the idea, I should say, from the B side of the nineteen sixties Hollywood Argyle number one hit Ali Oop You know how you right? What did you just say to me? All right? I guess not. Uh. The B side was called show No A Lot about Love, and there's a baritone and a flute playing the same line together all through it. And but on moon Age day Dream, Bowie's playing a recorder and a baritone. Sacks. He played them both himself. He got his first instrument was the sacks. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that some of the vocal takes from the first recording session sounded weird, so they took this one a minor third lower than the first time they tried it because the original key is just way too high for him. But it's funny. He does return to this technique frequently. He loves putting his voice through like hell. I mean, the famous one is Um Heroes, where they set up the microphone successively farther and farther away from him every verse, so he had to belt louder and higher every time to get heard. And it's just God, that's one of the best songs ever. God love him, God love him for wrecking his voice for us, because I don't know, you listen to some of those later live recordings and it's like, yeah, well that in the cocaine. You put that much cocaine down your vocal cords, they're not gonna do what they're supposed to do. But yes, God love him for suffering for us. Like the Christ I mean, you mentioned Mcronson's solos here. I mean, we could pick any one of the solos on this album just to dissect and gush over. Just picking this one. You mentioned that it's just so crucial to defining this era of Bowie's sound, and Bowie so ed up Rons's musical contributions in the booklet accompanying the thirtieth anniversary edition of Ziggy. He said, uh, he called Mike perfect foil and collaborator, mixed raw, passionate. Jeff Beck style guitar was perfect for Ziggy and the Spiders. It had such integrity you believed every note had been wrenched from his soul and in a moment that could be viewed as thunderstealing. Because this was after Rono had died in the early nineties, Bowie claimed that he literally drew out the shape of the solo that he wanted for every song, and the graphic that he drew with a crayon or felt tip pen for the moon Aged Daydream solo. He described it as starting as a flat line that became a fat megaphone type shape and ended as sprays of disassociated and broken lines, and um that whole idea of visual representation of music was an idea that he borrowed from. He said, he borrowed from Frank Zappa. You said that it goes back even yeah, I mean there's all there's like John Cage and La Monte Young and Anthony Braxton, all these different avant garde composers of like Anthony Braxton has just like titled his ridiculous. Uh. Some of his compositions don't even have proper names, they're just like graphical stuff. And also like Frank Zappa was like a he hand did all of his scores. So I don't know how much I buy that, but sorry, let's do a lightning round on Suffragette City. Yeah, speaking of innovative ways to get sounds, that sound that I had always assumed to be saxophones on Suffragette City, It's not a sax. It was created by an a RP synthesizer, and Bowie wanted a larger than life sacks sounds, so he and Ken Scott I imagine Rono all collaborated to create sounds that a real sax couldn't. The Art Odyssey one of the most famous synthesizers of all early synthesizers, but deeply famous sound. You have heard it on Rocketman Chameleon by Herbie Hancock, the doctor who theme Zappa stuff, Kraftwerk Devout, Yellow Magic Orchestra, which is Reuchi Sakamato's first band. I mean it is people are obsessed with the arp and um, yeah, so if that sound sounds familiar to you, it justifiably is. Thank you for taking that detour with us. Let's talk about Mott the Hoople. Yes, I didn't realize this before recording it himself. Bowie offered Suffragette City to Mott the Hoople, who were an English band that he loved, but they were about to break up, and to try to persuade them not to he offered them several songs and offered to produce them. They refused to take Suffragette City, but instead grabbed All the Young Dudes, which became a huge hit, thanks in large part to Bowie's uh, not only his songwriting skills but his production work. And he's yeah, we had my my beloved wife and I had a semi fight about this because we were listening to the glaston Berry said, and then we went back and listening to the original All Young Dudes and I like, yeah, that's Bowie on there, and she's like, no, it's not. We looked it up and he's like a scratch vocal, I think a guide vocal. Yeah that ends up still on there, but yeah, you can hear him um, oh boy, Heigel slang corner, Please Jordan give it to me. Yes, I'll I know. Given your tireless research into the slang found on Aretha Franklin's version of Respect, I thought you might like this dive into the famous wham bam, thank you ma'am exclamation on Suffragette City. The line is the title of a track on Charles mingus album Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah, which would have been very familiar to Bowie because he was a massive jazz fan, and according to Mingus, the phrase wham bam, thank you ma'am was something that his drummer Max Roach used to say when he was quote unable to express his inner feelings. Um I love that and uh. David is believed to have borrowed the Heyman backing vocal from the Velvet Undergrounds sixty eight song White Light, White Heat, and this brings us to the album's epic closer, Rock and Roll Suicide, which blends a lot of different influences James Brown and Jacques Brell somehow probably the only overlap I can ever think of these two people. Bowie has suggested that the French poet baud Laire helped inspire the lyrics, but there's also believed to be connections to a poem by Manuel Machado called help Me with This Chance and Deliu, which is probably a reference to Chiana and Deliu, which is the man No I think, Oh yeah, that's the slicing up Eyeballs one slicing of Byyeballs, the Pixie Song reference it. But you say there's a problem with this. Yeah. So the poem has the line life is a cigarette, cinder, ash and fire. Some smoke it in a hurry, others savor it. Uh. It's in the Peter Doggett book, which is I think it's called Man Who Sold the World David Bowie in the seventies, and he is actually talking about another obsessive Bowie fans research on this, but he points out that David Bowie could not read Spanish as of nineteen seventy two and that no English translation of the poem existed at this point. So that is one Bowie fan fact checking another Bowie fan, brought to you by two other Bowie fans. So we're now entering recursive Bowie fandom, or maybe it's like yeah or human centipede. But the line oh no, love, You're not Alone likely references the Jacques Brell song You're Not Alone, which appeared in the musical Jacques Brell was Alive and well and living in Paris. I love Jacques Brell. I came to his music mostly through Scott Walker, who did tons of his songs. I think he might have even done an album that was just Shocked bro Co and Bowie was a huge Scott Walker fan. He was even in the Scott Walker documentary thirtieth Century Man a few years ago, which well, I guess fifteen years ago by now, which is awesome. Yeah, and Bowie love Jacques Brel and performed his song my Death during some of the Ziggy Start Us live shows. He's also performed I think he performed Amsterdam at the BBC a number of his songs. So Jacques Brell big influence on Bowie um. But in addition to this French torch ballad, Bowie also claims that rock and roll Suicide was influenced by James Brown's try Me and Lost Someone. He calls them loose inspirations, which is again I just think a crazy melding of influences. And he talked about this later. Is it gave an interview to performing songwriter, and he said, what I enjoyed is being able to hybridize these different kinds of music somewhat. It wasn't obviously a fifties pastiche even though it had that rhythm that said total fifties, but it actually ends up as being a French chanson. That was purposeful. I wanted that blend to see if it would be interesting, and it was interesting. Nobody was doing that, at least not in the same way. Um So, now that we've gone through some of the songs individually, let's talk about Ziggy Start Us as a whole. It's often touted as a concept record, but it was never really conceived as such. Um. The working title was Round and Round, which is a Chuck Berry cover that was recorded, but I don't think it was it released in one of those Mammoth Gargantuan reissue sets. It's definitely out there, but yeah, it was originally included on early track listing for you know. The early version of ultimately became Ziggy Startist, as was the Port of Amsterdam cover by the Jacques Brell song and Velvet gold Mine, which later becomes the Todd Haynes movie and another song dimension Holy Holy, another song called Holy Holy. They didn't fit the ziggy thing, so they got cut. Well, it wasn't so much that they didn't fit the ziggy thing, it was just they you know. According to Ken's Scott and members of the band, there was really no discussion of a plot or any kind of you know, overarching concept while they were recording this, and David basically admitted as much of years later. He said that he basically assemble of an album of tracks that fit together thematically, and the whole theme kind of emerged slowly, but it wasn't really a premeditated thing. Yeah, so it starts to emerge as a picture one. Stuff is getting cut and essentially the lynchpin to this is Starman does a last minute edition, which boggles my mind. The r C a xex listened to an early acetate version of the record and, in as every exact must do at one point in their life, say where's the single? Um to their trained ears that it lacked something catchy enough to go number one with a bullet. So David went off and wrote a song He bumped the Chuck Berry cover and start Man. It references space Oddity, which he possibly did to tweak the suits because that was his biggest hit at the point, but you know, it had a lot of other things that went in there. It has t Rex. We didn't talk about Mark Bowland, but he's obviously a big rival slash influence on Bowie at the time. Old friend. They've known each other since like the mid sixties and they're basically friend of me. Is the the yellow patent leather shoes that Warhol was so obsessed with were a gift from Mark Bowland and and uh, it's got the guitar figure and not from you keep Me hanging on by the Supremes. And it also has a bit of a Judy Garland nod. You know that chorus has the octave jump from over the Rainbow and so well. Uh, and apparently he combined them at one point. He did a live performance. At one point he interpolated U Somewhere over the Rainbow into star Man. I've never heard that. That's I think in the David Bolli in the seventies book, and with Starman the narrative coheres. The story becomes this idea of a visionary poet named Ziggy who attempts to save Earth which is headed towards destruction, ultimately only to be deified and destroyed by ego and rock and roll excess. And you know this is not a move that occurs without precedent. The Beatles had pioneered this meta idea of portraying a fictitious group on Sergeant First, who had made their rock opera Tommy. But Bowie commits to the bit is what he does more than you know, he becomes, he goes method. Basically, the structure of the record is a meta commentary on the structure of a rock record right while perfecting well yeah, and also an A plus rock record. You know you Tackically, you have all these couched political themes like the end of the world, organized religion, extraterrestrials, the alienating nature of fame. And it comes at the right time because by two we're into the me decade. The optimism of the sixties has died. You've got increasing social unrest, economic ecological uncertainty. England is into the recession. That sort of gets the punk movement um record breaking unemployment, near constant striking, and coupled with the fact that they're what fifteen years out of World War Two, so it just everything is still bombed um constant power outages because the grid isn't working, and so it's a very real possibility that Bowie thought there were five years left, and whether or not he did believe it, he committed to the bit um. There's a critic named Paul Trinka who called Ziggy Start Us a tribute to artifice, a play on identity, an alter ego placed on an alter ego. It had been in David's mind since he first gushed over a guy that he thought was lou Reid. A star was whatever people thought you were as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more, too much information after these messages, But no man is just a concept. I am the propeller of salt. Continue. Where did z start Us himself come from? Let's dive into the specific influences that Bowie pulled to create this alter ego. Uh first and foremost aliens. Bowie loved aliens. Aliens were one of his enduring passions. It stretched back to his childhood when he would sneak downstairs after bedtime to watch episodes of the BBC's Quartermass Experiment on TV, which was this pioneering sci fi show, and it was one of Bowie's very favorites, and as a boy, he really came to believe that aliens were watching him, studying his habits. He began to wonder if he might be one of the Light People, who were allegedly an alien bred race of super people who were supposed to include luminaries like Galileo Churchill and Isaac Newton, and by the late sixties he was contributing to London UFO newsletters and even when UFOs spotting on his roof, I love this, he I guess, I don't know how this would help with UFO spotting, but he would point a wire coat hang are at the sky for long stretches. I guess I. I don't know what that did. But a neighbor saw him doing this and yelled up asking if he got transmission from BBC two because he looked like a TV antenna. And he stopped doing it soon after because he was embarrassed, but the subjective aliens still really fascinated him in this topic showed up frequently in his new songs um So aliens is a big one. Also Iggy and Lou his new friends. When composing the story of a starman who fell to Earth. Bowie was inspired by real life falling stars, these grandiose yet tragic figures who traveled too far down the road of excess and lost their way. And the most obvious of these is Ziggy Pop, who we talked about earlier. Um, it was really come on hard times in this period and he really become something of an obsession to Bowie. Over the last year. He'd obtained footage of Iggy performing at I think it was the Cincinnati Festival in nineteen seventy. It's very famous early Iggy footage. It rules. Yeah, it's on YouTube. It rules. There's the line where he's wearing the silver gloves and literally it's that famous photo of him pointing with one hand which held aloft by the crowd. Yeah, it's like, I think it's like the moment the crowds. Well, it probably isn't the moment the crowdsurfing was born, but one of the most incredible early examples of crowdsurfing. Uh and Bowie would watch this footage repeatedly on a real the real projector at his house and this footage inspired him, but it also really haunted him because on film, Iggy looked like a feral god. He's shirtless and again he's being held aloft by his you know, his legion, his disciples, and now Iggy could barely summon the strength to leave the couch that had become his home. Uh. This Iggy character that Jim Osterberg had created had gone haywire and nearly killed his creator. It's a rock and roll suicide in a sense. And so that was a big inspiration for the inner workings of Ziggy Stardust, and to a lesser extent, David was also inspired by Lou Reed, who was again now living with his parents out on Long Island in a state of self imposed exile from music. Both Lou and Iggy had become victims of the industry and also their own idolatry. And this was really part of the course for nine one, which is a really rough year for music. In the last three years, you had the deaths of Brian Jones, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, not to mention the kind of abdication of Pink Floyd founder said Barrett Fleetwood, Max Peter Green and the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson. They all stepped back to deal with um increasingly debilitating mental illness. Interestingly, some have thought that the line in the title track zig played guitar, he played at left hand but made it too far was a reference to Jimmie Hendrix, who was also left handed. Uh So, David had seen the hazards of rock and roll close range, and during his first trip to Los Angeles he had met this guy, Gene Vincent, who was an early rock and roll pie pioneer. His song be Bappa Lula is like you know, one of the the sacred texts of early rock, and Jene visit was only thirty five, but when Bowie met him he was looked just really old and sickly, and his body had just been mangled from years of hard living. And just a few weeks before Bowie entered the studio to begin work on Ziggy Stardust, Jean Vincent died, and so that I think on some level impacted Bowie. And Bowie also borrowed Jean Vincent's movements on stage he'd been uh he developed a limp from a car crash Jean Vincent did, and David used Jean's hobble as part of some of his early Ziggy started us stage moves, and he called the hobble first position for ziggy star dust its ballet reference. Right yeah um. But the unlikely linked between down and out musicians and messianic aliens can be found in the story of an early British rocker named Vince Taylor, and it's Taylor is best known today for recording the original version of The Clashes Brand New Cadillac, which is Vince Taylor's vision Rules. But in the early sixties he had a brief moment of being poised to be kind of the new Elvis in Europe, at least that's how they were promoting him. But in the mid sixties he started suffering a series of really distressing mid concert breakdowns, uh, culminating one night when he appeared on stage in white robes and the form the crowd that he was in fact Jesus Christ, and the incident pretty much killed his career and he filled those days wondering the coffee shop scene in the London district of Soho, basically ranting at anyone who would listen. And it was there that he met a pre fame David Bowie, and they got to know each other a little bit and David would always remember Vince spreading out a crumpled map onto the sidewalk outside of a crowded subway station and pointing out various UFL landing sites across Europe. Uh So this was a guy who was, to use Bowie's own words, out of his gourd, totally flipped, not playing with a full deck at all. But he remained in David's mind as quote an example of what can happen in rock and roll midway between an idol and a cautionary tale. And this brings us to kind of the most personal influence of Ziggy start us his brother, his half brother Terry, and the topic of madness was always a very compelling theme for Bowie given the streak of mental illness that ran throughout his own family, especially as half brother Terry. And Terry is a really fascinating figure in Bowie's life. He looms like a specter throughout it. He's kind of was haunted by him forever. Terry was much older than David, and David looked up to him as a hero as a little boy, and Terry turned him on to art and jazz and beat poetry and all the stuff that David really loved as a team. But by his early twenties, Terry started displaying symptoms of schizophrenia, which worsened dramatically as the years went on, and he died by suicide in the eighties, laying down in front of a train. Uh. And David always felt the streak of what he called madness in himself and frequently cited his music and the multifaceted personas that he had as a way of keeping a sanity in check. And he once said, one puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity. As long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music and into my work, I could always be throwing it off. So Vince Taylor forced David to confront both his greatest dreams of rock stardom and also his deepest fear of insanity. And I would say that more than any one person, Vince Taylor was probably the guy who inspired Ziggy the most. And so with that we have pinned down, or at least mapped out the soul of Ziggy. But let's talk about the name. Uh. You know, it's easy to assume that Ziggy is just the word iggy with a Z. But David has said a number of things about it. He told Rolling Stone at one point that it was just one of the few Christian names he could find beginning with the letter Z, which I guess for convenient. Umy, Stardust doesn't do the same zane that actually kind of works. Um. Then in an interviewing Q magazine, he said that it came from a tailor's shop called Ziggy that he passed on a train, and that he glommed onto it because it had that the iggy connotation. But it was a tailor's shop, and so he said, well, this whole thing is going to be about clothes. So it was my joke calling a character Ziggy because Iggy pop famously is only fifty clothes at any given time. Um, possibly, Jamie, can we pull up those numbers? Uh? But Stardust, where do we get stardust from? Stardust is a nod to an offbeat American singer known as the legendary Stardust Cowboy a k a. Norman carl Odom is something approaching a country sci fi tiny tim It will get you in the neighborhood of his whole stick him. I know. I think I think you've talked to him inasmuch as you have exposed me to him. Ottoman released a charmingly bizarre country sci fi single called I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship in nineteen nine, the same year as Space Oddity and even on the same label. David was given some of his singles by people at the record company, and much like Pork the play not the food Stuff, it blew his mind. When someone asked Odom why he added legendary to his name as a teen, he replied, I am a legend in my own time, which is very very bowie, and it's got this great mixture of old and new. You know, you've got stardust, which two people of this generation. Probably first thing that leaps to mind is the Jazz Standard by Jogi Carmichael, but it is also in a very literal sense, the dust from stars, and the other important ref that comes around this time from that is wood stock. You know. Carl Sagan is coming into vogue at this time, and he's recently popularized the notion that if all matter from the universe is descended from what was present at the time of the Big Bang, then we are really essentially matter from stars were stardusts, and so it's in that line and wood stock that everyone loves so much. Um, I take it that you don't like. It's fine, It's fine. No, I mean he gets into a little I love Carl Sagan, but it gets into a little that hippie deepie stuff for me, which we are all nothing. I'm too much of a nihilist to buy into that. Um, it's a cool name for a project like Ziggy Stardust because you know, the whole idea of stardust things that have existed for millions of years being recycled and reformed. That's kind of what Bowie's doing, you know, with Ziggy Stardus as an amalgam of familiar but disparate elements. Yeah, what he called a grand kitch painting. Um. But yeah, right, I mean, look, you can play spot the influence with Bowie, but some people would just call that spot the steel. Almost everyone in his life at some point has said like, oh he got that from me, right, Like he got a different element of a different era from me. Mick Jagger would famously joke never wear a pair of new shoes in front of David which I don't think was a joke. But anyway, David getting bringing this all back to the legendary Stardus Cowboy, David had become a lifelong fan of him, and he covered the I took a Trip on a Gemini spaceship song on his two thousand two albums Heathen, which surely put some badly needed royalties and the coffers of Mr Cowboy. Uh. And they met that year for the very first time after Bowie had obsessed over him for thirty years, and he reportedly completely fanboyed out, which is just truly adorable. So you know, I mean some of you will about Bowie and his you know Magpie. Yeah, he was a true music fan and when he loved somebody, he really went went to bat for him and tried to help him when he could. He could meet dignitaries or whatever all day long. When when he met an artist who really touched him, it showed, And I always thought that was cool. I love it when artists stay fans. Um So we have the name, we have the soul, the clothes. Everyone knows that it's the clothes that make the man, or in this case the star man. For inspiration, thank you, thank you very much for inspiration. Bowie looked towards the futuristic minimalist outfits worn and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which had been released in nineteen one, only to be promptly banned in the UK. Um Specifically, he loved the look of the drugs, the androgynist teenage thugs who's crisp white outfits underscored their ruthless brutality. David would later say, I wanted to take the hardness and violence of those outfits and soften them up by using the most ridiculous fabrics. And they assembled outlandish jump suits from cloth obtained at London department stores and vintage furniture fabric and the end result was very kind of charmingly homemade looking, at least the early versions of the Zig Start Us outfits. Bowie would later have meant. It was a cross between the Djinski and Woolworth's, something cobbled together from whatever was lying around, and the look was finished off with a pair of knee length wrestling boots done up in fire engine red, and he debuted the look at his twenty fifth birthday party on January eighth, nine, seventy two, a fitting start to a new year that would be defined by ziggy at least in his life. Um David might have been very enthusiastic about dressing up as a flamboyant, androgynous alien, but his band not so much. These were all tough guys from northern England, and when they first got to look at these new outfits, their initial reactions were variations of I'm not wearing that. Mick Ronson moaned, I'm a musician, I've got friends that are gonna watch me and again. He was a hard man from Hall, this rough industrial town in northern England, so he was horrified. And he was so horrified that he actually packed his bags and headed to the local train station, intent on quitting the ban for good, apparently just before a gig and drummer Woody woodman Z spent an hour on the train platform coaxing him back into the fault. But after the rapturous response from audiences, particularly the ladies in the audience, to these new outfits, they all very quickly warmed to the idea of these crazy clothes, and David would later say, when the guys realized how many girls they could pull, and they look so outlandish they took to it like fish to water. They never had so many women in their lives, and so they got tardier and tartier, and not later and later they got sluttier and sluttier looking. He and Bowie used reverse psychology to get these gruff guys to wear makeup, telling them that it would make them look normal under the bright spotlights. So there was always this mad dash for mascara before showtime, which Trevor Bolder also, in addition to being a great basis one of my favorites from the era, probably the best set of mutton chops in Rock and roll. Yeah, they're like they look like badgers growing out of the side of the good Lord. Sorry as you were well. Speaking of hair, the hair came last. Ziggy's famous hair came indirectly from David's mother, which is very strange, especially we don't have time to get into this in this episode esppecially considering their difficult relationship. UM. For more, check out David Bowie Off the Record, available from the ir DADO. Thank you, Thank you very much. UM. David's mother, Peggy, had her hair done by a local hairdresser named Susy Fusey I think is her name, who would later become Mark Ronson's not Mark Ronson, who would later become Mick Ronson's wife. And David's mom passed along Susie's name to David's wife Angie, who came in one day to get her haircut. She got a spiky new do. It was dyed red, white and blue and very unmissible, just like Angie herself. And Andree was thrilled with Susie's work and suggested that she come back to their house to see what could be done with David's shaggy locks, but she deemed too Rod Steward dish. That's a quote, and a good one, and it's funny, I mean, unlike the rest of David's style, it really hadn't evolved much from his sixties folk hippie period. And Susie suggested that David get a haircut too, and David was open to it, and he started looking through magazines to try to find the look that he wanted, and the other result was a blend of a few different fashion spreads. One was modeled Christine Walton in the August issue of Vogue, and also a bit of Kansai Yamamoto shoot in Harper's where he used a red kabuki lion's wig too great effect. And that's not the last time we'll talk about Kansai Yamamoto, the great Japanese fashion designer. So Susie got out of razor and started slicing out this elaborate feathered I I was just puffy in some places and spiky and others like a sci fi peacock. And um, a few weeks later, he would famously die his locks red hot red. That was the color marked on the die, and the whole Ziggy start Us look was in place. I can't believe he still had hair after what they put that that that that die had thirty volume peroxide in it, and then on top of that, she used an anti dandruff treatment called guard like over the count to help it stiffen and stay in place like my gel a Man vocal cords hair. He put everything through the ringer, including his dick, as we'll talk about later. UM, I don't have a segway for this next one. Going from there, Uh, the look was in place. Time to capture for posterity. There you go the cover for Ziggy start Us and the Spiders from Mars was shot January nineteen seventy two at photographer Brian Ward's studio in Little Muse in central London. They'd had a few studio shots with the band before wards suggested that David accompany him outside to the street. It's the golden how he wants to make the most out of the last bit of natural light. But it was a cold and rainy winter night and David had the flu, so he didn't want to walk too far. He wanted something that evoked a Brooklyn Alley scene, so he grabbed mcronson's guitar. They walk a few doors down from the studio to twenty three head In Street and David stopped, rested his foot on the stoop and four snaps. That is a tremendously high batting average of film. To iconography. UM five years dot Com, which is the insanely detailed Bowie fan site, has suggested that some of the inspiration from the cover came from Michael Powell's proto serial killer film from called Peeping Tom, which is about a London photographer who kills his subjects with a knife hidden in his camera tripod. Um. Really, it's like up there with psycho as far as like the early slasher cinema. Uh, so make of that what you will. Now let's talk about the sign. Let's get even more granular and weird with it. Bowie's photographed standing outside of a fur dealer called k West, which you can see on the cover, and uh, as fans are want to do project all kinds of stuff onto that. Uh. They have theorized that it was a code for Quest, as in Galaxy Quest. Um. Hm, great movie. We should do an episode on that. Bowie loved it because it added a sort of you know, he loves all this meaning dota layers of interpretation stuff, So of course he loves that. But the good furriers of k West did not. They threatened our c a with legal action, writing a letter that read, in part, our clients are furriers of high repute to deal with a clientele generally far removed from the pop music world. Our clients certainly they have no wish to be associated with Mr Bowie or this record, as it might be assumed that there is some connection between our client's firm and Mr Bowie, which is certainly not the case. Incredibly British, but they did come to appreciate the steady flood of tourists who came to photograph their storefront until they closed in the early nineties. Then we're coming into it belongs in a museum. Part two. The original K West sign was quote retrieved by a Bowie fan after one night out on the tiles in This is according to the aforementioned five years dot com. They published an email exchange with this fan as well as his pictures of the sign. Uh. He claims that it was so badly damaged when he took it that this was an act of preservation. He said it quote it wouldn't have lasted a heavy storm. So it was ultimately restored and exhibited as part of a David Bowie exhibition in two thousand twelve, which is close enough to a museum to probably satisfy you. Huh, I was getting there. Yeah, And the same year that exhibition landed, a heritage plaque was placed at the site of the former K West Furriers, marking it into perpetuity as the place that Ziggy crashed to earth. Um. Now it's time to take the show on the road. The first Ziggy show is on January two at the Friars Aislesbury, not far where Cooper could filmed the subway attack scene in a clockwork orange. People paid sixty pence a ticket to see Bowie, who is amusingly, if not humbly, billed as the most beautiful person in the world. Sure, uh, only an hour from London. So many kids made the pilgrimage, and among them were Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor, names you may recognize from a little group called Queen Uh. And if they were looking for inspiration for a theatrical, larger than life band fronted by a weird alien sex god, they certainly found it. Let's set the stage literally and metaphorically. The lights go down. Wendy Carlos synthesized version of Oh de Joy from the Clockwork Orange score blairs from the p a strobe lights, Trevor Boulder and his sideburns appear, Mick Ronson and his cheekbones appear, and they're all dressed in metallic cat suits. The drummer was also there. Woody Woodman see Head was also present. They launched him to hang onto yourself. They're opening tune as Bowie struts on stage with his spiky red hair paler than death himself, diamond patterned one piece red wrestling boots. I mean, I don't know. I'm surprised people's heads didn't actually literally explode. This blend of costume, choreography, drama, all couched within the context of a rock and roll show, nothing short of revolutionary. And then you have this, and then also I feel like we just keep coming away from this. The songs, the bangers, Banger after Banger, first time live live in the Flash, and people went April. They swarmed his dressing room. They wanted to know where he cut his hair, They wanted to know where he got his clothes. Some people just wanted to touch him. One girl was so overcome with emotion that she punched him, which sounds like something she should work out with her therapist. And the next day the headline about the show literally read A Star is Born. Not a stretch to call this one of the most far reaching moments in live rock and roll history. You know, you got your James Brown at the Apollo, You got Duke Gallington at the Cotton Club. You got Miles Davis at Newport, We got Zeppelin at Earl's Something Dealing at Newport, Dealing at Newport. Yeah, yeah, Beatles on Salt and Bowie at the Friars Aislesbury. Anyway, the effects of that night would ripple outward, touching on virtually every aspect of popular culture, not just music, but film, fashion, social and sexual mores, and the very nature of twentieth century fame itself. Uh. You know, you could call it the night the seventies began, couldn't you? Jordan's I think you could. Yes, you absolutely could. And I think that it's here that we should leave you all, dear listeners. For today Ziggy Stardust is born. Hallelujah, Rejoice. We'll talk about how the star Man made a star out of David and inspired generations of artists. On part two of Too Much Information, Ziggy start us edition, I go, what do you think? I am so excited and all and all of you dear people should be as well. All right, well, thank you so much for listening. My name is Jordan's and I'm Alex. Join us here next time for part two. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike Johns. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows