David Bowie: Rock’s Transcendent Shapeshifter


He was born in 1947 in Brixton, England, as David Robert Jones, three single names so ordinary that they are held by themselves by millions of boys and men in the English-speaking world, hugging the anonymous, near invisible John Doe.

But when David Robert Jones became David Bowie, he became one-of-a-kind, singular, but also a musical shaman who became Ziggy Stardust and Major Tom and took on other personas and wrapped himself and his voice in cloaks of reinvention.

The world has lost David Bowie, and all of his edgy, generous, outward bound gifts went with him but also stayed behind.  Bowie died of liver cancer in New York on Jan. 10 after a long illness and courageous battle at the not-quite-old age of 69.

But Ziggy, and the music, and that voice, the makeup, the androgynous  look, the spiked red hair, the costumes,  the movies, the voice, the videos, the performances, all of that stuff remains—if not the same due to his absence, pieces of stardust, always hot to the touch.

Ziggy came out of his second album, full blown, a persona, a style, glam and punk and singularly him, looking not just to be heard, but to be fully seen: “Ziggy played guitar/jamming good with Weird and Gilly/and the Spiders from Mars/He played it left hand/but made it too far/Became the special man/Then we were Ziggy’s band.”

He could always sing the blues. In “Space Oddity,” Bowie turned to movement, to glitter, to folk-rock, to blues and something very special and different that lasted through the the Ziggy phase. And then he retired as Ziggy and became a host of other things, including for real (or unreal) a bona-fide movie star in cult movies like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (he was that man) with Candy Clark, the Tony Scott erotic horror movie “The Hunger” with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.  

His life in the later years of the 20th century was erratic, but the music always bolstered by his ear for fine lyrics that he often wrote himself and a voice that was his alone, a pop voice, a screamy  voice, an anguished voice, especially “Heroes.” His second marriage to the model Iman steadied him, his life and his music. His last album, “Black Star”, released last week on his birthday, Jan. 8, was a collaboration, perhaps not surprisingly, with a jazz quartet. It was called by the New York Times “typically enigmatic and exploratory.”

His visionary spirit, his journeys in invention, his music inspired jazz players, Lou Reed, Kanye West, the hip and the hop.

Here’s one last look:

Go online.  Dig out “Heroes,” the version he sang at the Live Aid concert at Wembley in 1985.  Here’s Bowie, skinny light blue suit, thin yellow tie, rich flock of brown hair,  tireless, thin, elastic, the drummer shirtless, a girl sax player with short blonde hair, two backups, and a stadium of thousands of thousands swinging their hands in the air

They were singing—not “Bye, Bye, Miss America Pie”—but “We could be heroes, for just one day.”

Say hello and goodbye to David Robert Jones, Ziggy Stardust.

Here’s to David Bowie, singular man, singer and supernova.

Here’s to Major Tom:

“I’m stepping through the door

And I’m floating

In a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today.”

They do. They do.

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