Hey, everybody, it's Jim McGuinn for Teenage
Kicks, and this week, in early January, is
the anniversary of both David Bowie's birth
and sadly, his passing. So we kind of feel
like we should celebrate his career at some
points here on The Current,
and on Teenage Kicks this week,
we're going to dig into the
Ziggy Stardust era for David Bowie. Now Ziggy
Now Ziggy Stardust was his fifth album;
it came out in 1972, and, you know,
he'd been working as a mime in the past,
so the idea of creating a 
new character and new identity and sort
of putting on a rock-and-roll mask was not
alien to David Bowie. The concept for the
album, bizarrely, started in the mid '60s,
when Bowie ran into a guy named Vince Taylor.
Vince Taylor was an old rockabilly star from
the U.K.;
he's the guy that wrote "Brand New Cadillac,"
which the Clash covered a little
bit later on, and apparently, Vince Taylor
was a little bit off of his rocker at this
point, and he told David Bowie that he was
an alien that was sent down to save the planet
with rock and roll. A-ha! Somewhere in the
back of David's mind, that idea marinated
for a little while, and when it came time
to make his record in 1971, '72, he brought
that concept back and created
"The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars,"
renaming his band as the Spiders from Mars,
and really writing an album about aliens,
alienation and the apocalypse.
Now, when the record was released, it wasn't really a success right off the bat,
but then Bowie was on "Top of the Pops," the U.K. music television show, in the summer of 1972,
and he came out with the full Ziggy
makeup and the look,
and that was the moment it created a sensation, and
it really put a clear division between the
earlier generation - the Beatles and the Stones
- and this new, futuristic 1970s space-alien
whatever; you know, the hair was radically
different, the makeup, the look, the feel,
the sound. So even though Bowie was kind of
a classicist in terms of he loved those records
from the '60s, he was putting that line in
the sand, and you were either with him or
not with him, and millions of kids in the
U.K. became with him. That tour became a sensation,
he became a phenomenon, he also had provocative
quotes in the press about his sexuality; people
were just really curious about this Ziggy
Stardust David Bowie thing. Now, there had
been previous people like Alice Cooper and
T Rex who had been in a similar sonic terrain,
but Bowie had the whole package; it was that
character that he created for Ziggy Stardust.
He went on the road and eventually got to
America, and he toured America, and while
in America, he started writing songs, which
became "Aladdin Sane," which is a pun on "a
lad, insane," talking about the rock and roll
lifestyle, being on a tour bus, being in this
strange country and seeing these strange things
happening all around him. And that was sort
of the next phase of Ziggy Stardust. He also
took the band into the studio and played some
of those favorite songs of the late '60s,
and that became the album, "Pinups," and again,
this was sort of marking a space where he
was both acknowledging the influence and putting
that music, even though it was only five years
old - those songs were from the late '60s
- he was putting those songs into the past
and saying, "This is now, this is the future."
Then, what did Bowie do?
He stopped!
The summer of 1973, only about a year after the beginning of launching Ziggy Stardust,
he retired Ziggy Stardust, and that was it.
And now, unlike The Who, who went on and made a movie about "Tommy"
and a movie about "Quadrophenia,"
and took their concept albums and played them
out for years and decades to come, Bowie never
really went back and did a full Ziggy anything.
He never really went back to the makeup, he
never really milked out that tour or anything.
He played those songs - those became the most
iconic songs of his career, probably - but
he kind of let it go. And so it's this perfect
time capsule of the 1972 to 1973 David Bowie,
those three great records that the Spiders
from Mars made, and of course, he went on
to an incredible career and influenced countless
generations of musicians since then, so this
week on Teenage Kicks, we're going to dig
into the Ziggy era of David Bowie.
[ukulele music playing]
Ziggy played...
Ukulele...!
I don't think Ziggy actually played ukulele,
but we can dream.
Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie this week.
Teenage Kicks.
Thanks to Fiona Smith for the makeup and hair.
Rock and roll.
Here it is.
