The artist David Bowie considered perfect: “You believed every note”
An artist as diverse as David Bowie isn’t always known for playing well with others. Most people can try putting together a group of musicians and sticking with them until their dying day, but if Bowie wanted to achieve all of his musical dreams, he was going to need a lot more personnel to round out his lineup. That meant that brilliant technicians like Tony Visconti and Brian Eno would fall by the wayside, but ‘The Starman’ considered Mick Ronson a godsend when he first heard him play.
This is strange because none of Bowie’s early work has the listener paying attention to anyone except for him. Compared to the massive clunk that his proper debut made, seeing him with his mile-high hairdo singing about voyaging into new lands was enough to get everyone intrigued the minute they heard ‘Space Oddity’.
Once he had a firm basis to work with, though, the seeds of Ziggy Stardust were already starting to be planted. Bowie had the concept for this mythical space-age guitar hero, but he needed a band to help round out everything. And given how glam rock was about to come in full force, Ronson was almost too perfect for his role.
Playing off of Bowie to a tee, Ronson’s flair for theatrics turned him into an indirect foil for everything the frontman did. If Ziggy was the personification of what a rock star looked like, Ronson took that initial flair and turned it into pure musicality, whether that was the sheer camp of the lead to ‘Starman’ or making sure that ‘Suffragette City’ was dripping with sleaze from the minute it started.
Looking back, Bowie thought that half of his glam rock period wouldn’t have been possible were it not for Ronson, saying, “[He was] a perfect foil and collaborator. Mick’s 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.”
While the Jeff Beck comparison is fairly apt, that doesn’t really do justice to what Ronson could do. There was no replacing a guy like Beck in the pantheon of guitar gods, but what Ronson did took that kind of virtuosic playing and turned it into something that even non-musicians could appreciate half the time.
And nowhere is his presence more felt than on Diamond Dogs, given the fact that he’s not there at all. Since Bowie was getting bored of his old sound, hearing him take a swing at lead guitar playing on ‘Rebel Rebel’ is one of the great missed opportunities in his history, considering what Ronson could do with a Les Paul in his hands.
Then again, it’s not hard to see how important Ronson was to the future generations of rockers. Just listen to anyone from Def Leppard to the thousands of other glam bands who came in their wake, and you will see a million copycats who saw Ronson as the blueprint for how to combine sleazy rock and roll showmanship with tasteful playing.
