David Bowie: How Ziggy Stardust Fell to Earth
On July 3rd, 1973, David Bowie sat backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon theater in London, waiting. Assistants, makeup artists and costume designers were preparing him for the most anticipated performance of his career: the final date of a triumphant first world tour with his extraordinary band, the Spiders From Mars. As he waited, hundreds gathered into the theater’s auditorium. Many of them were followers — they dressed like Bowie, in daring and glamorous outfits; they cut and dyed their hair to duplicate his shock-red mane; they made their faces pallid, and painted their eyes with radiant shimmer. These were the people, the outcasts, whom Bowie spoke to in “Changes,” when he sang, “And these children that you spit on/As they try to change their worlds/Are immune to your consultations/They’re quite aware what they’re going through.”
Two years before, few attending this event knew who David Bowie was. He had been singing and playing rock & roll since 1962, and making quaint and eccentric albums since 1967, to little attention. His progress had proved so fitful that he wondered if he wanted to continue with it. He saw himself, he said, as an actor; he wanted to use his face and body, his voice and songs to play roles, outlandish ones. Then, in 1971, he realized he could combine it all — music and theater — into one character: Ziggy Stardust, an otherworldly being who came to Earth to save it, but instead found rock & roll; who sang about change and pain, and played the music better than anybody; whose vanity soared out of range, and who had the charisma to fuck anybody he desired, woman or man; and whose aspirations delivered him to ruin, his best purposes unfinished. That character had made David Bowie famous, and it formed an audience and community around his singularity.
This night, though, David Bowie would undo Ziggy Stardust. Years later he said, “I couldn’t decide whether I was writing the characters, or whether the characters were writing me, or whether we were all one and the same.” He was afraid this confusion would lead to madness, and there was nothing he feared more. When he left the Odeon that night, he intended to leave Ziggy Stardust behind, but he would also leave behind the most important deed of his life: He had provided a model of courage to millions who had never been embraced by a popular-culture hero before. He helped set others free in unexpected ways, even if he couldn’t do the same for himself.
David Bowie had been born with a need to move on. It was how he would cope with a history that might otherwise never have been survived. His mother, Margaret Burns (known as Peggy), was the first of six children born to a troubled family in Kent County, England. Three of her sisters suffered from mental illness, and Peggy herself, some thought, might be borderline. Before World War II, Peggy entered into a love affair, and gave birth to a son, Terence Burns, in 1937. (She also had a daughter after a second affair, but gave the child up for adoption.) Peggy was 33 when she met Haywood Stenton Jones, a married man with a daughter of his own. Haywood, known as John, had run a London music hall that failed, costing him his inheritance. When he met Peggy, John was working for a children’s charity organization, and stayed devoted to that job for the rest of his life. In 1946, he divorced his wife, marrying Peggy soon after. On January 8th, 1947, their only child, David Robert Jones, was born in Brixton.
Peggy’s first son, Terry, lived with the Jones family off and on into David’s adulthood. Peggy doted on David; she carried him on a pillow as a small child and let him wear her makeup. But Terry was somebody that she and John merely provided for. David, though, loved and looked up to Terry, and it was Terry who showed David the most warmth. In 1956, Terry joined the British Royal Air Force for two years. When he came back, he was different. “Something had happened to Terry while he was serving in the Royal Air Force in Aden during one of Britain’s last colonial wars, and whatever it was, it had disturbed him profoundly,” Bowie’s ex-wife, Angela, wrote in her 1993 autobiography. Terry grew easily upset and didn’t care about his appearance. He would be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.
At the same time, Terry proved the first important influence on Bowie: He introduced him to 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of will; to the writings of the Beats — including Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs; to the work of Bowie’s future friend Christopher Isherwood, who wrote about a life of sexual freedom; and to jazz of all sorts. David tried to return the favor. In 1966, he took his half brother to see a Cream concert in Bromley. “On their way home after the gig,” wrote David Buckley in Strange Fascination: David Bowie — The Definitive Story, “Terry became increasingly agitated until he fell to his knees and began pawing the road. He could see cracks in the tarmac and flames rising up, as if from the underworld.”
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