Bowie in Total: Before and After Ziggy

I recently saw the David Bowie exhibit at the AGO, which was very illuminating and inspired me to start this project. I listened to every Bowie album produced and tracked his progress from one album to another. What I found was the greatest discography of any musician I have ever heard and reinforced my opinion that Bowie is the greatest artist of any kind of the last hundred years. His catalogue is startlingly original and fairly consistent, save for a ten year period of awfulness from 1983 until 1993. Even this awfulness is illuminating as it is some of the worst music ever produced by a talented artist. For sake of readability, I will break this analysis up into sections.

David Bowie (1967)

This is an interesting debut, largely indebted to English folk with little of the daring or edgyness that would characterize his later work. It is miles away from the daring English rock from the time that he would end up covering on Pinups. Still, the songwriting is fairly strong and it is quite polished for a debut, not surprising since he had been in music for years prior to this album. Overall, a good but not especially memorable debut. The song "Uncle Arthur" is excellent, but the best songs are on the bonus disc such as "The London Boys" and the sublimely ridiculous "The Laughing Gnome".

Space Oddity aka David Bowie (1969)

The impact of the title track diminishes the importance of the rest of the album. Bowie is beginning to make a transition both away from folk to more ornate arrangements as well as a move towards the themes of science fiction and mental illness that become prominent in his work soon after. Generally a solid album but somewhat inessential except for a few tracks. The title track and "The Cygnet Committee" are both excellent, while the rerecording of "Memory of a Free Festival" on the bonus disc featuring the early incarnation of the Spiders from Mars stands out as one of his best songs.

The Man Who Sold the World (1970)

This album represents his biggest leap forward and still stands up as one of the best albums amongst many other great albums. Bowie's trademark piercing wail is fairly well developed by this point. Bowie and his backing band of guitarist Mick Ronson, producer/bassist Tony Visconti and drummer Mick Woodmansey create a daring hybrid of cutting-edge hard rock and freakish folk. The twin themes of dystopian futurism and insanity come to the forefront of this album, both musically and lyrically. "Saviour Machine" tells a Terminator-esque story of a sentient computer tasked with running the world who, in it's boredom, contemplates annihilating humanity. "All the Madmen" looks at the treatment of mental illness from an ambivalent and disoriented perspective. "Running Gun Blues" is the first of Bowie's aggressive anti-war statements that have continued to 2013s "I'd Rather Be High". "She Shook Me Cold" is a surprisingly effective evocation of Jimi Hendrix's style that highlights Ronson's guitar mastery. While I can't say if it's one of Bowie's very best albums, it is definitely close to being my favorite. The standout tracks of this record are hard to pick but the hard rock epic "The Width of a Circle" and the psychedelic madness of "After All" particularly stand out.

Hunky Dory (1971)

The precursor to Ziggy Stardust has many of the folk and psychedelic elements of Bowie's earlier work but adds a large element of cabaret to the mix. While Mick Ronson also plays on this album, his distinctive than on its predecessor and successor. Instead, the most prominent instrument is the piano, played by Rick Wakeman from Yes. Wakeman's work on this album is not nearly as showy as with Yes but is the driving force of songs like "Life on Mars". This album also has Bowie temporarily (for four albums) suspending his long relationship with producer Tony Visconti. The cabaret elements can be overpowering at times but the songwriting is excellent, perhaps Bowie's best up to this point save for "Kooks" and "Song for Bob Dylan" which are too derivative and simplistic to make much of an impression. My favorite songs from this album are, of course, "Life on Mars" which has largess and drama to spare as well as "Queen Bitch" which is the clearest antecedent to Ziggy Stardust and is a generally appealing rocker and finally "The Bewlay Brothers", a powerful though inscrutable epic with a distinctive and very cool string sound.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

This is one of Bowie's most loved albums as well as his most famous alter-ego. This album defined the glam rock movement both in concept and execution. The concept of an alien rock star on a pre-apocalyptic Earth is interesting though not particularly well-developed, especially compared to later concept album Outside. The songs are uniformly thrilling though. Sonically, the album is a mix of acoustic wanderings and electric intensity. "Hang on to Yourself" and "Suffragette City" are particularly driving. The impending doom of "Five Years" is reminiscent of the menace of The Man Who Sold the World with a new, more polished sound. "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" is the ultimate breaking up the band, while emphasizing the optimism before the end with the chant of "you're not alone!" Starman, with its striking arrangement and catchy chorus, became one of Bowie's biggest hits up to this point. My only complaint about the record is that it doesn't rock nearly as hard as the live albums Live in Santa Monica and Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture. My favorites on this album are "Moonage Daydream" for its excellent progression and awesome coda as well as "Hang on to Yourself" for its sheer speed and intensity.

Aladdin Sane (1973)

The final proper album of the Spiders from Mars line-up sees Bowie and company fusing the cabaret elements of Hunky Dory with hard-driving rock of Ziggy's more intense songs. We also find Bowie's saxophone playing becoming more prominent, an element that is increasingly important to later albums. Piano wizard Mike Garson joins the band at this point, adding his virtuosic skills to songs like "Time" and "Lady Grinning Soul". Garson adds a new sense of fullness to the band's sound that makes this one of Bowie's most sonically-pleasing albums. Bowie's vocals rise to the occasion, showing a previously undeveloped strength. Songs like "Time" and "Cracked Actor" (which would make a great theme song for Toronto's mayor) add a level of sexual explicitness to his lyrics that must have been unheard of at the time. My favorite songs on this album are "Aladdin Sane" which sees him revisiting the theme of mental illness with one of his most complex arrangements, getting close to the free jazz sound of Outside, as well as "Panic in Detroit" which matches one of the best intros of all time with an equally awesome song and lyric.

Pin Ups (1973)

Bowie, in typically idiosyncratic fashion, caps off the Ziggy era with a covers album of songs from 1964-1967 Britain that influenced him. This album was the only one from this era that was new to me and it was a very pleasant surprise. The remaining Spiders put in some of their strongest performances while the songs range from the very familiar to fairly obscure. Bowie's respect for Ray Davies is made clear by having Davies' lyrics to the Kinks song "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" as the only printed lyrics on the package. Both the Yardbirds and the Who are represented twice on the album. The strongest tracks are a slowed-down version of the Who's "I Can't Explain" and a soulful version of the Mersey's "Sorrow".