“It sounds kind of weedy”: The album David Bowie thought never sounded right
Very few careers that last longer than a couple of decades can claim to have been perfectly consistent. For artists to maintain both critical and commercial appeal, they must experiment with new ideas and styles. This process of trial and error will invariably result in a series of peaks and troughs. Although David Bowie was a legend of cosmic proportions, he was not immune to the undulations of artistic appeal throughout his five-decade recording career.
As it happens, Bowie set out on a trough. He knew full well that his debut album was a little incoherent and obscure, but these traits had been a string to the bow of so many contemporaries, such as Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. The album’s zany nursery rhyme structures were a little too much for contemporary pop consumers to stomach. “I haven’t much to say about that in its favour,” Bowie said of the album in a 1990 conversation with Q. “Lyrically, I guess, it was striving to be something, the short storyteller. Musically, it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place.”
After his debut album, Bowie took a little while to regroup and restructure his musical outlook. Like a Martian on a mission, he seemed to study popular trends and gradually tailored his musical outlook to contemporary tastes. The tide began to change in 1969 with the release of Space Oddity. Though the album failed to make a huge splash, its like-titled lead single was timed to perfection with the Apollo 11 Moon landings and became Bowie’s first major hit.
The Man Who Sold the World, a personal favourite of Kurt Cobain’s, continued on a promising trajectory before what we can consider Bowie’s first masterpiece album, Hunky Dory. With this foundational success, he mused on Lou Reed, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, paving the way towards his first fully-fledged alter ego in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. As Mr Stardust, Bowie defined the emerging glam rock scene and crucially broke into American consciousness.
As far as most fans are concerned, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is the quintessential Bowie masterpiece. The album was the acme of the artist’s first chapter as a glam rock star and championed the genre with its balanced spread of glitter and macabre shadow. Binding the package together was a tangible, emotive concept that documented a hero’s demise under the crippling weight of fame.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Bowie once reflected on the album, grateful for yet unsurprised by its role in establishing his global fanbase. “I wasn’t at all surprised Ziggy Stardust made my career,” he said. “I packaged a totally credible plastic rock star.” The androgynous character and accompanying music perfectly captured the front lines of cultural evolution in the early 1970s, taking stock of 1960s progress and lighting the way forward into the ages of punk and new wave.
Though Bowie appreciated the success of Ziggy Stardust and had few regrets about his songwriting, he ultimately took issue with the album’s execution. “I find the Ziggy Stardust record very thin,” he told Q. “I don’t like the sound on that, it’s much thinner than I always thought it was. It sounded really powerful then; maybe systems have got better, it sounds kind of weedy.” Understandably, technological advancements between the 1970s and ’90s somewhat outdated the album’s mix. While the fans will always love it, Bowie was never one for reflection.
As he ventured forth into the 1970s, Bowie grew from strength to strength. Following the soul-embracing 1975 LP Young Americans, he entered what many, including himself, deem his most creatively enlightened chapter. After the brilliant Station to Station, which debuted The Thin White Duke, Bowie decamped with Iggy Pop to Europe to distance himself from a cocaine addiction. Here, he began his Berlin Trilogy with the krautrock-tinged Low.
“Station to Station and Low,” Bowie said, picking out his two favourites of his own albums in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly. “Some of my best work was in those two albums. I understand Hunky Dory and Ziggy; they are indeed a lot more hummable.”
