My Month of Bowie, day 5: 'The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars' (1972)

David Bowie gets to play dress up on Ziggy Stardust.

The album: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (RCA, 1972)

The Ziggy has landed.

My thoughts: When I think of David Bowie's career, I tend to think of characters and concept albums. I mean, that's what he was famous for, right? Inventing wild new personas and then telling stories about them through song? But he didn't really get around to that stuff until his fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a collection of songs about a bisexual alien rock idol who conquers Earth with his glorious music but eventually succumbs to his own demons. Or something like that.

The thing is, strictly on my own, I might not have even gotten that Ziggy Stardust was a concept album or was trying to tell a story of any kind. A few of these songs deal directly with Ziggy and his band, and Bowie seems to be musing about rock stardom here and there. He also introduces the idea of an impending global disaster in the opening track, "Five Years." But I'm not confident I would have been able to put all these puzzle pieces together on my own.

After two listens, I've concluded that Ziggy Stardust doesn't really tell a coherent, followable story in the way that, for instance, Harry Nilsson's The Point! (1970) does. Another concept album, Frank Zappa's three-part rock opera Joe's Garage (1979), also tells the story of a fictional rocker and his fictional band, but it's way heavier on exposition than Ziggy Stardust. Note that Nilsson and Zappa narrate their respective concept albums with spoken, non-rhyming prose. Bowie doesn't bother with that here.

What really matter in a case like this are the songs, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust has a plethora of all-time great ones on it. Besides the title track and "Five Years," we have future rock radio standards like "Moonage Daydream," "Suffragette City," "Starman," and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide." But there's not a track here I'd toss into the bin. After the quieter, more piano-driven tunes of Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust finds Bowie back in full rock god mode. He sounds like music's answer to Alexander the Great. And soon, he will weep, for there will be no more worlds to conquer.

Ziggy Stardust is the second-consecutive Bowie album I wish I'd owned in physical form when I was a young man. If it hadn't gotten through to me as a teenager, perhaps I would have been ready for it by 21 or so.

Next: Aladdin Sane (1973)