David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust: The Musical (1974)

David Bowie's breakthrough album, 1972's Ziggy Stardust, is a loose and non-linear concept album about an androgynous alien rock star, who lands on earth five years away from the end of the world, here forming a rock and roll band. It tells of his attempt to give humanity hope in that dystopic future, through music, sex, and drugs, with Ziggy being the main character behind promoting that ideology. What he sees there is a world in complete disarray, as well as a youth completely disillusioned and distant from the generations that came before them, who they consider out of touch with reality, with them being left "on their own" to deal with the consequences. Without any electricity or desire for rock music, he and his band are seen forced to sing about the news of the period, all of them about, of course, the imminent end of mankind. He's a representation of the ultimate cliche rock n' roll superstar, being destroyed by both his drug intake and his own fans' glorification of him at the end of the album, them disappointed his calls for hope and love didn't result in anything that could save them. The album was both a gigantic critical and commercial success, and also one of the firsts in a string of many great LPs to come from him during the seventies. Its follow-up, 1973's "Aladdin Sane", is a fantastic glam rock record that shares many of its predecessor's themes of stardom and heavy sound, its name being a pun on A Lad Insane. Bowie even nicknamed the album "Ziggy goes to America", due to it being written while on tour in the US, with its sleeve containing the name of the city each song was written in. 

He maintained the Stardust persona even after its release, adding the new album's tunes to the tour setlist and simply keeping on going, giving us all the feeling that Alladin Sane was nothing more than a sequel to the concept album. The new songs fit in perfectly with the whole concept, adding depth to its characters and universe, which Bowie certainly took note of and used to his advantage during concerts. But by July of 1973, it seems, he was already tired of the whole thing, and during the final show of the tour, in the Hammersmith Odeon, took all the audience by surprise by announcing his retirement from live performances from the stage, shortly before the last song of the concert. What they all didn't notice, however, was that Bowie was only doing so "in character", and was effectively putting Ziggy Stardust to rest, and moving on with his career. After that show (immortalized in D.A. Pennebaker's concert film), he disbanded his Spiders from Mars backing band, and started to conceptualize two new projects: an album adaptation of George Orwell's "1984", and a musical based on Ziggy Stardust, managing to write some six songs for the former and two for the latter. However, soon afterward his interest in the musical waned, most likely due to the fact that it had only been one year since he was performing as the character and it was too soon for him to tackle such a thing. And to put insult to injury, he was denied the rights to Orwell's work, and so David combined both projects into one, transforming them into the fantastic "Diamond Dogs" album, released in mid-1974, going on tour and even becoming a blue-eyed soul artist for a while after that. But what if Bowie had made that Ziggy Stardust musical?

This reconstruction is an update to my The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars post from November 2019. Our goal here, instead of merely compiling an extended version of Ziggy Stardust, is to create a two-hour musical separated into two one-hour acts, that can also function as a triple LP. That means we'll be looking for roughly thirty songs, and given the vast amounts of material Bowie recorded during this very prolific period, we won't have a lot of trouble finding it. Whenever they are avoidable, there will be no live recordings, as they feel quite out of place here, and only recordings from Bowie's glam rock period of around 1971 to 1974 will be considered. Additionally, we won't be respecting the original album's sequencing, as the added material will outnumber it almost two to one, meaning we'll have to find our own way of putting all of this music together in a way that makes sense. This musical's narrative will also be pretty loose, as none of the songs on the original are very narrative-driven, and without Bowie actually sitting down to write exposition-based songs for us, we're left with a production that's quite light on a story. So, we will be considering that an intended feature instead of a product of the circumstances. The focus of this reconstruction will be not on the story, but on the songs themselves and how they could fit together to create the best possible long-form rock opera centered around the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, through the lens of Bowie's mid-70s discography. With that out of the way, here's what our version of this long-lost project looks like:

First act

Hang on to Yourself (Ziggy Stardust)
Ziggy Stardust (Ziggy Stardust)
Watch That Man (Aladdin Sane)
Soul Love (Ziggy Stardust)
All the Young Dudes (Aladdin Sane)

-
Five Years (Ziggy Stardust)
The Prettiest Star (Aladdin Sane)
John, I'm Only Dancing (Aladdin Sane)
Moonage Daydream (Ziggy Stardust)
Lady Stardust (Ziggy Stardust)

-
Rebel Rebel (Diamond Dogs)
Sweet Head (Ziggy Stardust)
Velvet Goldmine (Ziggy Stardust)
Holy Holy (Ziggy Stardust)
My Death (Ziggy Stardust)

Second act

Cracked Actor (Aladdin Sane)
Time (Aladdin Sane)
Let's Spend the Night Together (Aladdin Sane)
Port of Amsterdam (Ziggy Stardust)
Drive-In Saturday (Aladdin Sane)

-
Rock and Roll With Me (Diamond Dogs)
Aladdin Sane (Aladdin Sane)
Panic in Detroit (Aladdin Sane)
Star (Ziggy Stardust)
The Jean Genie (Aladdin Sane)

-
Starman (Ziggy Stardust)
Lady Grinning Soul (Aladdin Sane)
Around and Around (Ziggy Stardust)
Suffragette City (Ziggy Stardust)
Rock and Roll Suicide (Ziggy Stardust)

Download link:

David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust: The Musical (1974)

Bowie (as Ziggy Stardust) performing live in Newcastle, June 1973.

Now, we need to figure out what will make the album and what won't, starting with what made the cut. The entire Ziggy Stardust album is included, minus "It Ain't Easy", a Hunky Dory outtake that was shoehorned into the concept and honestly doesn't fit the concept very well. All the main outtakes from the Ziggy sessions can be added, those being "Velvet Goldmine", "Holy Holy", "Sweet Head", "Around and Around" and "Port of Amsterdam". All of those, except for "Sweet Head", were included in early running orders for the Ziggy album around December 1971, showing how close they were to actually fitting into the album proper. Live staple "My Death", which was an integral part of the performances and the character, despite never making it to the studio, is an almost obligatory inclusion, even though we'll be having to use a live version of it. The entire Aladdin Sane, the self-described Ziggy Goes to America, was performed live in character as Ziggy Stardust, except for "Lady Grinning Soul". We will include it anyway, alongside the other nine tracks, as it feels like it belongs on the album and provides some variety to the album, pointing the way to the soul sound of Young Americans. Aladdin Sane outtakes "All the Young Dudes" and "John, I'm Only Dancing" also make the cut, those being two songs with very strong connections to the Ziggy Stardust concept that inexplicably didn't make the album, but did get performed live regularly. And finally, the most obvious inclusions, the two songs known to have been written explicitly for the musical: "Rebel Rebel" and "Rock and Roll With Me".

Now, on to what didn't make the cut. The September 1971 songs "Looking for a Friend", "Shadow Man" and "Something Happens", which were recorded in-between Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, but don't have any narrative or circumstantial link to either of those, will not be included. Neither will anything from Pin-Ups, which unlike the covers included here, didn't have anything to do with Ziggy and were just Bowie covering some of his favorite songs and influences from the mid-60s. Re-recordings of older songs are fine (we did include "The Prettiest Star" and "Holy Holy", after all), but not when it comes to songs previously released on an album, which means the re-recorded version of "The Supermen" from the late 1971 Trident sessions doesn't make the cut. There also won't be any space for the unfinished "Zion"/"A Lad in Vein" from the Aladdin Sane sessions, which would sound quite jarring between these songs in the state that it's in, but if finished, it would make for a sensible inclusion. A shame that it was abandoned. As for how we sequenced this behemoth, we used his 1973 setlists, which he played in character as Ziggy Stardust, as a basis for how to sequence this two-hour collection of songs, establishing a loose narrative around the Ziggy persona and his 1971/1973 material. As for the songs he didn't play live, we tended to replace songs that weren't part of the concept, but played live ("Wide Eyed Boy from Freecloud", "Space Oddity", "Changes", just to name a few), with their closest corresponding outtake, to keep the story as close to the shows as we possibly could. 

Even though we really weren't planning this reconstruction from an album standpoint, all sides are five songs long and between 17 and 21 minutes, which is within reason for the 70s. I do have to point out that, almost by accident, most sides work exquisitely well as their own small mini-acts, with strong openers and closers that make sense in the spot they were given, which is quite remarkable. Also, both acts are slightly under an hour long, ideal for a musical, and given that there would be an intermission and some dialog, give us a nice two-and-a-half hour attraction. As for both acts themselves, since Aladdin Sane was a continuation of Ziggy Stardust, the first act is mostly music from Ziggy and the second disc is mostly music from Aladdin, in an attempt to show the narrative progression between them, and the contrast between pre-fame and post-fame Bowie, with most of the cover versions being on the second act. The cover is an outtake from the photo sessions that spawned the original Ziggy Stardust album cover, which I then slightly edited and added a title to. You can pretend that's the cover to the original cast recording, if you wish to. This project certainly helps flesh out the rather loose Ziggy Stardust concept, giving it a depth and some world-building it certainly lacked when it came out in 1972. And hearing all of these songs together manages to show us how fantastic Bowie's glam period was, when for a brief period it seemed like he could do no wrong. It's just a shame that he couldn't put something like this together, to better represent when this cracked actor played his greatest part.

Sources:

- The David Bowie Bible

- 5 Years: The Ziggy Stardust Companion