FILTER REISSUES
The mother of all rock’n’roll fantasies is given the all-encompassing deluxe box set treatment. He stooped to conquer, says Mark Paytress.
David Bowie
★★★★
Rock ’N’ Roll Star!
PARLOPHONE. CD/DL/BR
AFTER ENDLESS reissues, Ziggy Stardust returns under cover of Rock ’N’ Roll Star!, a 5-CD, one audio-only Blu-Ray, two-book box set. It closes in October 1972 at Boston on the first US tour. But it’s where it begins that’s the real bombshell.
Likely guided by the hand of Bowie, who watched over his archive, the entire Ziggy Stardust escapade – song, album, live show, get-out-of-jail alter ego – can now be traced back to one stridently strummed acoustic demo sketched out in February 1971 in a San Francisco hotel room. Titled So Long ’60s, its chords and melody are instantly recognisable as Moonage Daydream. The lyric is roughly the “Keep your mouth shut” verse sung twice, before bidding “So long, Jimi”. (Hendrix, the left-handed superstar guitarist who died five months earlier, is long regarded as an inspiration for Ziggy.) This surprise find is Bowie’s ‘good riddance’ message to the decade that refused to take him seriously. “So long, decline,” he concludes.
So Long ’60s is Bowie’s tabula rasa, one that enables him to introduce a more playful sound and attitude that would serve him well in a post-Bolan era. But it took almost a year for the fictional rock star’s rise and fall to develop into a loose storyline-driven album.
The best of …Star!’s 29 unreleased cuts appear on Disc 1 which is split into three parts: Songwriting Demos, Arnold Corns and Haddon Hall Rehearsals. After the initial shock, we’re on familiar territory with Hang On To Yourself, also taped during Bowie’s promotional visit to the States. This previously bootlegged cut doesn’t feature Gene Vincent as rumoured. But it does find Bowie hitching his mast to upbeat rock’n’roll, part Eddie Cochran, part Velvet Underground.
Back home and motivated, he quickly assembles a bunch of nobodies, names them Arnold Corns and reworks the two US demos. It’s clearly an attempt to emulate Andy Warhol’s Svengali role with the Velvets, only Bowie also writes and sings. He introduces a new, strained, high-camp squealer voice, sung incognito for fear his outgoing record company might lay claim to the songs. One of the hallmarks of Ziggy’s style was born out of necessity.
By March, he’s demo-ing Lady Stardust on piano and Ziggy Stardust (with its distinctive riff already intact) on guitar. Another demo, the previously unheard piano-rocker Star (AKA Stars) likely taped in May, confirms that a Ziggy and Star theme was a
