The Bowie Project #6 – Aladdin Sane (1973)
Aladdin
Sane is the first
album David Bowie released from a position of success and stardom. After the success
of Ziggy Stardust the year before, Bowie and the character he was
portraying were on top of the world. Retrospectively his previous releases,
such as Hunky Dory, also began to achieve critical and commercial
success as fans scrambled to consume everything the enigmatic artist had
produced up to this point. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do next
and how he would follow up his breakthrough concept album. The result was Aladdin
Sane, an album that was admittedly a little rushed with most of the tracks
written between shows while he was touring the US. This gives the record a
distinctly American flavour as Bowie explores his own perception of the country
and presents a landscape filled urban decay, drug, sex, violence, and death all
while examining the pros and cons of touring the consequences of new found fame. It’s more disjointed than Ziggy but that’s not necessarily bad a
thing. It features a harder glam rock sound than the previous album but also
demonstrates Bowie as an artist willing to play with style and genre. Overall,
the album features some of the most interesting music Bowie ever produced, but
besides it’s iconic album art this record tends to fly under the radar a little
bit, with only the lead single “The Jean Genie” being immediately recognisable
to the casual Bowie fan.
The title is a pun on “a lad insane” and was likely inspired by Bowie’s half brother Terry Burns who had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. This title also alludes to Bowie’s shift in personas, he was no longer the alien rockstar Ziggy Stardust, but a new character named Aladdin Sane. The change was not so huge, with Bowie has even referred to the character as “Ziggy goes to America”, but the slight shift allowed him to take a slight step back from the dystopian space suicide story of Ziggy into something a little bit more grounded in reality. Ziggy was not quite dead yet, he was merely reborn. The lightning bolt that splits his face in two on the cover was supposed to represent Bowie’s mixed feelings around touring and his newfound stardom. The teardrop on his shoulder was also supposed to highlight the duality of it all. The image was the most expensive cover art ever made at that time and went on to be one of Bowie’s most iconic images, to this day he is intrinsically linked with the symbol of the lightning bolt, which is interesting considering that photo shoot was the only time he ever dawned that particular look (well almost the only time).
The album
according to biographer Christopher Sandford shows Bowie as “simultaneously
appalled and fixated with America”. The US tour he was on took a toll on his
mental health and this was the beginning of his long-time cocaine addiction. He
had also just co-produced Lou Reed’s Transformer and mixed the Stooges Raw Power, which further entrenched him in American culture and added to his
exhaustion. In Bowie’s own words he wanted “to be up on the stage performing my
songs, but on the other hand not really wanting to be on those buses with all
those strange people”. Like his previous two releases, the album was produced
by Ken Scott and backed by the Spiders from Mars, a lot of the music is highly
influenced by the Rolling Stones, particularly their album Exile on Main Street which came out the year before, even going as far to feature a
Stones cover on the second side. Bowie also explores a number of different musical
genres on the record as it shifts from glam, to doo-wop, to Brechtian
avant-garde art rock.
The record
opens with a song that feels like it could have come straight off Exile
with “Watch that Man”. This upbeat rocker is often criticised for Bowie’s
vocals being buried behind the instruments with NME saying it’s a prime example
of to show that the album was “written too fast, recorded too fast and mixed
too fast”, and to a certain extend I get it but I also think this type of
mixing gives the song a less produced and more authentic rock ‘n’ roll sound so
like many I am torn down the middle. The song takes the listener into a Roaring
Twenties style party featuring free-flowing alcohol, dancing, and jazz but with
rock ‘n’ roll backing keys and saxophone. There are also modern references with
some speculating that “The Man” is a sneaky reference to the
Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”.
This leads
us into the more experimental title track “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” which
references the years preceding World War I and World War II, with the third
unknown date reflecting Bowie’s belief that an upcoming World War III was not
far away. The song is notable for the avant-garde piano solo by Mike Garson
which at the time was incredibly unique in mainstream music and elevated Bowie
among many of his peers in terms of artistic experimentation. Bowie wrote the
song on a ship returning to London from his first US tour. On the journey he
read Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the “bright
young things” partying in London before the first World War, Bowie said he was
struck by how they seemed just like people today saying, “people were
frivolous, decedent, and silly and suddenly they were plunged into this horrible
holocaust”. The song is eerie and ethereal and is an earlier indicator of
Bowie’s attempts to break out of the confines of rock and could be seen as a
forebearer for the type of music he would explore later in the 70s with his
“Berlin Trilogy”.
Next up is
a personal favourite of mine, the doo-wop inspired “Drive-In-Saturday” which
finds Bowie in more familiar territory: Dystopia. The song describes the
inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world in the future (Bowie has said the year
2033) where people have forgotten how to make love and need to watch old porn
to see how it’s done. The song was inspired by the landscapes of Seattle,
Washington, and Arizona as seen from the night train on Bowie’s tour and it
namechecks a number of contemporary figures including Mick Jagger, Twiggy, and
Carl Jung. The song was supposedly written for Mott the Hopple to follow up
their previous Bowie penned hit “All the Young Dudes” but this has been a story
of some debate. The legend goes that Bowie offered them the song and when they
turned it down in a fit of anger Bowie shaved off his eyebrows, a look he would
maintain until 1974 (as seen on the album cover). Either way, it’s a great
track that I love very much, the juxtaposition of 1950s doo-wop, with 70s
cultural references, all under the background of futuristic sex barren
dystopian landscape is right up my alley.
“Panic in Detroit” was based on Iggy Pop’s recollections of 1967 Detroit riots and
features what has been described as a “Salsa variation on the Bo Diddley beat”
with congo drums and female backup vocals. The song has got a unique paranoid
style that really gets your heart pumping and it paints a perfect picture of
chaotic frenzy as someone is trying to haphazardly evade danger. I am surprised
it’s not used all the time in movies or tv shows because it’s quite cinematic
in that way.
Closing
side one is “Cracked Actor” a song that describes an ageing Hollywood star’s
encounter with a prostitute and highlights Bowie’s exposure to the sexual
excesses of Los Angeles and all the sleaze that comes with it. While Bowie had
plenty of sexual references on his previous albums they were just buried in
layers or ambiguous imagery, that is not the case on this song with lyrics like
“suck baby suck/give me your head” it would be hard to interpret this song as
being about anything other than sex. Cracked Actor was also the title of a
1975 documentary on Bowie that chronicled his life in LA, it’s notable for
showcasing his declining mental state at the time and his increasingly
destructive cocaine addiction.
Side two
opens with “Time” a song which like “Rock ‘n’ Suicide” the year before
personifies the character of Time. The piece has been compared to the cabaret
music of Jacques Brel as well as the theatricality of Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill.
The piano style gives the track a 1920s feel mixed with an avant-garde European
feel. The lyric “Time – he flexes like a whore/Falls wanking to the floor” was
allowed to remain the US single edit of the song as most Americans weren’t
familiar with the term “wanking”. The song feels grand and epic, but for how
big and overblown the musicality it also feels slightly lacking in substance
and a unfortunately a little bit underwhelming, like something’s missing.
“ThePrettiest Star” was originally released as single in 1970 and was rerecorded
for this record. Bowie had written the song for his future wife Angela Barnett
(later Angie Bowie) and reportedly played it down the phone to her as part of
his proposal. The original version of the song featured Marc Bolan of T-Rex on
guitar. The rerecorded version was updated to be more inline with the glam rock
sound of the album but Mick Ronson has recreated Bolan’s guitar work
note-for-note. It’s quite beautiful love song that I do have soft spot for.
The big hit
off this album is “The Jean Genie” which was recorded in New York in a single
take and went to number 2 in the UK singles chart. According to Bowie it was a
“smorgasbord of imagined Americana” with a protagonist inspired by Iggy Pop.
The song was a live favourite and performed by Bowie on almost all his tours.
The song has got an insane resemblance to the Sweet’s “Block Buster!” which was
released shortly after and managed earn the number 1 spot in the UK charts.
Everyone involved accepts that this is just a coincide with songwriter Nicky Chinn
stating he later met Bowie who “looked at me completely deadpan and said
'Cunt!' And then he got up and gave me a hug and said, 'Congratulations!'"
The album
closes with one of the most interesting songs on the record “Lady Grinning Soul”. The ballad was inspired by Bowie’s first meeting with the soul singer
and former Ikette Claudia Lennear in 1972. The song, which has often been
compared to the style of a James Bond theme tune, describes a woman as the
perfect portrait of decadence, lust, and beauty. The song was uncharted
territory for Bowie who had never before released such an outpouring of desire
in such an elegant and sophisticated way. The song is in stark contrast to the
guitar-driven sound of the rest of the record, ending on such an emotive and distinguished
note, in my opinion it’s one of the more buried masterpieces in Bowie’s
discography, I really love it.
Aladdin
Sane had over
100,000 copies ordered in advance of its release in 1973 and debuted at top of
the UK charts, where it remained for five weeks. In the US it peaked at number 17,
but Bowie already had three other albums in the charts at that time which had
many declaring him “the best-selling artist since the days of the Beatles”.
Critical reception was positive with the general viewpoint being that it was a
continuation of the path set out by Ziggy, however Bowie himself was
reaching the end of his glam rock era and the mix of styles and genres on
display here make it apparent that he was ready to explore new territory. It’s
for this reason that at the end of his 1973 tour he decides to kill off the
Ziggy Stardust character once and for all (while technically Aladdin Sane is a
separate character on the tour supporting this album Bowie presented himself as
Ziggy even while performing songs from this record). This is not a perfect
album and there is merit in the argument that it was rushed and mixed badly but
it also features an artist at the top of his game creatively, experimenting
with limitations of rock music, and pushing himself to go deeper. Aladdin
Sane proved that Bowie had what it took to continue making amazing records
and the success of Ziggy Stardust was not just a flash in the pan, he
has always been learning and progressing, and there was a lot more to come for
David Bowie.
Aladdin Sane (1973) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (9/10)
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