Ziggy Stardust

Ziggy Stardust (demo).
Ziggy Stardust (LP).
Ziggy Stardust (live, 1972).
Ziggy Stardust (live, 1973).
Ziggy Stardust (live, 1978).
Ziggy Stardust (Bauhaus, 1982).
Ziggy Stardust (live, 1990).
Ziggy Stardust (broadcast, 2002).

You have to start with the riff, right? Two bars long, it repeats four times in the intro, twice after the first chorus, three-and-a-half times at the end. It’s only five seconds in each duration but is perfect and complete: a slammed G chord, a fanfare, then the tough connective tissue leading to the next G chord. To make a riff like this, for guitarists, is like forging a passkey to Valhalla. (That said, the song’s demo reveals that Bowie’s responsible for most of it.) And the riff’s only one of Mick Ronson’s voices on “Ziggy Stardust.” There’s also the motif under “Spiders From Mars” or “the kids were just crass” in the verses, the tonal colors Ronson provides throughout the track, the vicious root chords in the chorus.

“Ziggy Stardust,” theme and title song of its album, is a snapshot keepsake of Ronson and his band (“Weird and Gilly” being Bowie’s sometimes-nicknames for Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey) at the height of their powers, with the first and last words Bowie sings being “Ziggy played guitar.” (The sequencing on the LP is inspired, with “Suffragette City” erupting a second after “Ziggy” ends.)

But “Ziggy Stardust” wasn’t intended as a guitarist’s tribute. It has grandiosity bred into it—it’s a paradox epic (the song that births “Ziggy” also kills him off), a plastic ballad (the verses move from G to B minor and later E minor, transitions that Roger McGuinn, noting the same change in “She Loves You,” described as “folk music changes” pilfered by rock musicians), a eulogy for a phantom.

the riff, anatomized

Even by the meager standards of rock “concept” albums, The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is a thin business. The collected songs are recycled Arnold Corns singles, random covers (Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam” and Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” almost made the final cut), and a few Hunky Dory leftovers. Even the last batch of tracks cut for the LP in early 1972 (“Rock & Roll Suicide,” “Suffragette City,” “Starman”) are only tenuously linked. Bowie’s unifying lyrical theme basically consists of using the word “star” in a few songs.

Bowie seems to have cobbled the Ziggy “storyline” together after he made the record. As Bowie described the story to William S. Burroughs, the world is doomed (“Five Years”) via some sort of Long Emergency scenario and then a black-hole-jumping alien race (or sentient black holes, it’s a bit unclear) arrives on Earth. Bowie called them “the infinites” (nicking from Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Burroughs’ own Nova Express). The infinites make a drugged-out rock singer called Ziggy Stardust their herald, he writes about them (“Starman,” we’ll give ’em “Moonage Daydream” too) and so becomes a messiah figure for a doomed generation. Then who the hell knows what else happens. The climax, allegedly, has Ziggy ripped to pieces on stage by the black-hole jumpers (“Rock & Roll Suicide”) who then, in Bowie’s words, “take his elements and make themselves visible.”

Despite this nonsense,”Ziggy Stardust” himself is one of Bowie’s best conceits. Ziggy’s ancestry included Iggy Pop, the mad British rock & roller Vince Taylor, the American eccentric The Legendary Stardust Cowboy (and there’s probably a touch of Biff Rose in the mix too), and rock & roll casualties like Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. Bowie pulped them all together. Ziggy’s been described as a “cartoon” rock & roller but that’s not quite right: cartoons have weight and presence, holding fixed positions in your memory (think of the eternal Charlie Brown or Superman). Ziggy is fluid and unknowable, a pictograph whose meaning alters depending on who looks at it.

His existence depends on his audience. By 1972, with rock music falling into nostalgia and self-parody, Bowie was able to paint a rock & roll life in a few broad strokes, taking from listeners’ collective memories (e.g., “he played left hand” references Hendrix), with the track serving another of Bowie’s mime performances. Bowie filled the lyric with pseudo-American slang (“jiving us that we were voodoo”), built Ziggy’s image out of pieces (“like some cat from Japan,” “well hung and snow-white tan”).

It’s unclear who’s narrating. It could be a kid in the audience, remembering Ziggy years later (like the Christian Bale character in Velvet Goldmine), it could be one of Ziggy’s bandmates, Weird or Gilly, or it may be the disassociated memories of Ziggy himself, a fractured perspective through which Ziggy sees (and kills?) himself on stage. It could be all of them, recounting a story that had ended and now needed to begin. If “Ziggy Stardust” was the score, Bowie’ s life over the next two years would be the performance.

The “Ziggy Stardust” demo, recorded ca. summer-fall 1971, is on the Ryko 1990 CD of Ziggy Stardust. (Bowie didn’t give the demo to Ken Scott, his producer, or his band, instead just playing the song to them on guitar in the studio.) The LP cut was recorded 8-11 November 1971. Three versions of “Ziggy” were taped for the BBC during 1972, and it was central to the 1972 and 1973 tours (a version taped at Santa Monica, Calif., was released as a single in 1994). “Ziggy” returned in Bowie’s 1978 tour, with a recording from Philadelphia on Stage; the song also was a regular on the 1990 “Sound + Vision” tour, as well as many of Bowie’s shows in the past decade. Bauhaus’ remake hit #15 in the UK in 1982, and was later collected on David Bowie Songbook.

Top: Ziggy in his youth, ca. March 1972.

Lady Stardust

Song For Marc (He Was Alright).
Lady Stardust.
Lady Stardust (live, 1972).
Lady Stardust (remake, 1997).

Bowie was fascinated by his contemporaries—dropping their names, covering their songs, producing their records. He traced their steps, aped their movements; he sought to remake them in his own image, or at least dress them in his own clothes. So Bowie turned Lou Reed into a glam rock icon, while making Iggy Pop an ongoing rehabilitation project. (Whether Bowie’s mix of Raw Power was salvage or vandalism is still a weary topic of debate). Bowie sparked Mick Jagger and was a shadow on John Lennon.

Most of all, there was Marc Bolan, Bowie’s greatest creative rival and, for a time, inspiration. While in early 1972 Bowie was still relatively unknown, Bolan had become a pop star (four consecutive UK #1s in 14 months) and the Ziggy Stardust storyline is in part a weird parody of Bolan’s rise to fame. Bowie watched Bolan as through a one-way mirror, mimicking his voice on “Black Country Rock,” drafting variations on Bolan in songs. A commenter noted that “The Prettiest Star” was likely as much a homage to Bolan as it (allegedly) was to Angela Bowie. “Lady Stardust,” originally called “Song For Marc,” was more overt: at the Rainbow Theater in August 1972, Bowie sang “Lady Stardust” while Bolan’s face was projected on a screen behind him.

“Lady Stardust” has a taste of fatality and loss; the song seems like a faded remnant of a lost era, Bowie imagining the future as a blighted past. The verses begin in A major and descend into the relative minor, F-sharp, while the chorus also has minor chords in its middle bars. “Lady Stardust” himself, whether Bolan or Ziggy, is both an object of worship for the boys and girls in the stalls, and a subject of abuse. In turn, he curses his audience, singing death ballads and imprecations with a smile, then withers into a black memory while still on stage.

As Nicholas Pegg noted, the lyric seems written in an “American” voice, with all its “outta sites” and “awful nice”s (also, Bowie mutters “get some pussy now” at 2:53 on the Ziggy cut). Mick Ronson’s piano playing has the somber, relaxed tone of an after-hours cabaret performance, while Bowie sounds a bit like Elton John.

“Song For Marc” was taped ca. April 1971 and eventually appeared on the Ryko Ziggy Stardust CD reissue. The Ziggy “Lady Stardust” was recorded on 12 November 1971. Bowie cut two versions of the song for the BBC in 1972, the latter of which is on Bowie At the Beeb. In January 1997, Bowie taped a remake of “Lady Stardust” with bass and backing vocals by Gail Ann Dorsey; it’s on ChangesNowBowie.

Top: Keith Morris, “Marc Bolan arriving at JFK Airport, February 1972.”

Star

Star.
Star (live, 1978).
Star (live, 1983).

Rock & roll was born reciting its own myths: take Chuck Berry turning “Johnny B. Goode” from autobiography (changing “colored boy” to “country boy”) into the Elvis legend. Yet cynicism about rock & roll fame was there too, like Bobby Bare’s take on Presley’s rise, “The All American Boy.” (“I picked my guitar with a great big grin/and the money just kept on pourin’ in.”) By the mid-’60s, as rock music became a cash-bloated, multi-national business, the Stones were mocking industry pissants (“Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”). The Byrds, folkies who saw A Hard Day’s Night one afternoon and decided to become rock stars, offered “So You Want to Be a Rock & Roll Star,” where selling out to The Company is simple, absurd and inevitable.

Bowie’s “Star” is descended from these songs, but something is off—it’s more earnest and yet more false. It could be a number sung by a teenage girl in a Broadway show, it could be a paying-your-dues anthem by a metal band. “Star” has no sense of reality, of rock & roll as a business: rock stardom is a fairyland contrasted to the weary business of politics or art. The singer sees his friends commit to activism or violence (like Tony, who goes off to fight in Northern Ireland) and decides he’s not cut out for sacrifice. Instead he just wants to be a rock & roll star, which seems easy enough. “So enticing to play the part,” the singer imagines, pouting into the mirror.

Bowie wrote “Star” (originally called “Rock & Roll Star”) in late 1970 or early 1971 and offered the demo to a group from Princes Risborough called Chameleon. (Chameleon’s version was never released.) According to Nicholas Pegg, Bowie had forgotten the song until a gig in Aylesbury in September 1971, when someone asked him about his “rock & roll star” piece. Bowie was drafting the Ziggy Stardust storyline (well, what there is of one) and saw that “Star” would fit perfectly. He slotted it between “Lady Stardust” and “Hang Onto Yourself.” It works—“Lady Stardust” is Ziggy as seen on stage; “Star” is Ziggy’s fantasies and ambitions; “Hang Onto Yourself” is what he performs.

Like many Ziggy Stardust tracks, “Star” has echoes of older songs. The intricate multi-tracked backing vocals were inspired by the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita,” Bowie said later. Most of all, it’s in debt to the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”: the opening verses of both songs are populated with characters off in the real world (“Jack, he is a banker/and Jane, she is a clerk” v. “Bevan tried to change the nation/Sonny wants to turn the world”) as contrasted to the singer, who’s in a rock & roll band.

The studio take of “Star” is built to be relentless: it’s a series of eight-bar verses, choruses and bridges glued together, underlaid with a hammering piano track (reminiscent of John Cale on early VU tracks) and filled with Mick Ronson’s interjections on guitar. It ends in a long outro, where the tempo slackens, two harmonized guitars briefly appear, and Bowie mutters and whispers, turning the fantasy ominous in its last moments.

Recorded 8-11 November 1971. Bowie performed “Star” during his 1978 tour (a recording from Philadelphia is on Stage, and also was released as a promo single) and in his 1983 shows, where it often was a show-opener along with a snippet of “Jean Genie.”

Top: A flu-ridden Bowie braces for stardom at long last, Heddon St., London, January 1972. Photographer: Brian Ward. (From this page of Ziggy Stardust cover photo outtakes.)

It Ain’t Easy

It Ain’t Easy (first performance, BBC, 1971).
It Ain’t Easy (Ziggy Stardust).

“It Ain’t Easy” was written by the American songwriter Ron Davies, who was born in Louisiana and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. At age 20, he was signed to A&M Records and in 1970 released Silent Song Through the Land, from which the song comes.

It’s unclear how Bowie picked up “It Ain’t Easy”; some biographers have claimed Mick Ronson had been playing it with his old band The Rats. It wasn’t that obscure a song, in any event: both Three Dog Night and Long John Baldry had already covered it, and Dave Edmunds soon would. Bowie first played “It Ain’t Easy” in his glam hootenanny BBC session of June 1971, and the song worked well as a finale: the singers taking turns on the verses, uniting in the song’s cavernous, gospel-inspired chorus. The ramshackle performance was in line with the other rock & roll circuses of the period, like Delaney and Bonnie’s groups or Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen Revue.

Bowie went on to cut a studio version of the song a month later, and used it to close the first side of Ziggy Stardust, an alleged concept record in which it has no discernible role. Maybe he just loved Ronson’s fine slide guitar on the track, or thought the song’s simplicity (it’s mainly just two chords, D and A, with a C thrown in during the choruses) and rock & roll cliches (we get “satisfaction” and a “hoochie coochie woman” in the same verse) gave the LP some ballast. Still, the fact that it made the cut for Ziggy while “Velvet Goldmine” and “Sweet Head” were axed remains one of the minor mysteries of Bowie’s career.

Debuted at the BBC on 3 June 1971, while the studio version was cut on 9 July. Never performed live, as far as I know.

Top: Hush Puppies takes a counter-feminist angle to sell shoes, 1971. “When the ‘Libs’ call us names like that it really means they think we’re rugged, masculine, virile.”

Moonage Daydream

Moonage Daydream (Arnold Corns single).
Moonage Daydream (Ziggy Stardust LP).
Moonage Daydream (BBC, May 1972).
Moonage Daydream (live, 1972).
Moonage Daydream (live, 1972).
Moonage Daydream (live, 1973).
Moonage Daydream (live, 1974).
Moonage Daydream (live, 1996).
Moonage Daydream (live, 1997).
Moonage Daydream (live, 2002).

I first heard “Moonage Daydream” when I was 16 years old, which is when you should first hear it. I was in my car, listening to some dubbed cassette of Bowie hits, when suddenly:

BAMMMMM-BLAMMMMMMMMM!!!
I’m an ALLIGATOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BAMMMMMMMMMM-BLAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!
I’m a MAMMAPAPA coming FOR YOU!!!

Teenage bliss. I can’t remember what my exact response was, but it was along the lines of “Jesus! What is this?”

I had bought in. “Moonage Daydream” intends to shock, its spectacular opening a battle between power chords (Mick Ronson hitting hard twice on D, then F#) and Bowie’s dramatics (the excitement furthered by the taste of silence between each chord and sung line). But the track quickly settles down into a groove and its choruses are moody and wistful—it delays the fireworks that Ronson and Bowie promise in its first four bars. The first solo isn’t Ronson but a duet between a pennywhistle and a baritone saxophone.

So “Moonage Daydream” can stand for all of Ziggy Stardust, a vaguely conceptual rock LP about a fake rock star whose songs both parody and subsume rock & roll. As Ziggy is pop music about pop music, so the lyric of “Moonage Daydream” is fused from old rock & roll phrases—“I’m an alligator” come from “See you later alligator,” all the “far outs” and “freak outs” are pilfered from the hippie LPs, while a bizarre line like “you’re squawking like a pink monkey bird” sounds like it was lifted from a lost novelty hit of 1960 (as the solo was, see below). It also could be the pseudo-Russian pop music of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, or a botched translation—as if an extra-terrestrial who had been monitoring our radio and TV broadcasts had fashioned an imitation of what it took to be our national musics. Bowie later claimed that was the idea all along.

Bowie wrote “Moonage Daydream” to be the debut single of his “fake band” project, The Arnold Corns, and then refigured it as part of Ziggy Stardust‘s early conception as a West End stage show. So from its inception, the song was meant to serve as entrance music, a character piece for a fraudulent character, whether impostor pop idol (the Corns’ non-singer Freddi Buretti) or plastic rock star (Ziggy Stardust, who Bowie would later claim on stage was the song’s author).

The Arnold Corns project petered out after two singles, only one of which was released, as Bowie focused on designing the Ziggy character and his never-quite-comprehensible storyline (Hunky Dory and Ziggy were recorded back-to-back, with some Ziggy songs preceding Hunky Dory ones, hence the timeline confusion).

What’s missing from the Corns “Moonage Daydream” (beyond Ronson’s guitar) is the sense that anything’s at stake—the Corns single, voiced by Bowie but allegedly sung by the cherubic Buretti (he’s the male equivalent of Chantale Goya in Godard’s Masculin-Feminin), is drearier than much of the music it’s mocking. The Ziggy “Moonage Daydream” works in part because the song was taken out of Bowie’s head and invigorated by Ronson, whose guitar heroics are matched by his string arrangements, bassist Trevor Bolder and producer Ken Scott (who put the phasing effect on the swirling strings at the end of the track).

By the time of the Spiders’ last concert at the Hammersmith in July 1973, teenage girls and boys in the audience were singing along to every word of “Moonage Daydream,” holding their hands to their faces while they sang the chorus, falling in love with themselves as much as they were with Ziggy. Using the strength and delusion of adolescence, the belief that the world somehow has been left open for you, they took the lie and made it sing to them.

Every night you knew that “Moonage Daydream” was going to be the one that really lifted them. Then we’d go and follow on from there to the end.

Trevor Bolder, 1976.

The Ziggy recording is the sum of its players. Bolder doesn’t get that much credit as a bassist, but his work on “Moonage Daydream” in particular is assured and inventive—he starts by anchoring Ronson’s opening chords, then serves as the main melodic voice in the choruses (his descending line, going down the frets from the D string to the A to the E, mirrors the wordless harmony vocals).

And then there’s Ronson. In the studio, Bowie drew a diagram for how Ronson’s guitar solo should sound—it started out as a flat line, grew to form “a fat megaphone-type shape, and ended in sprays of disassociated and broken lines,” Bowie recalled years later. Ronson looked at the chart, went off somewhere (he often wrote arrangements in the bathroom), and came back and performed a solo that exactly followed Bowie’s directions.

The Arnold Corns single version was recorded in April 1971 and released as B&C CB149; the Ziggy Stardust track was cut on 12 November 1971. (Bowie was inspired to suggest a baritone sax/pennywhistle solo from the B-side of The Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop,” “Sho’ Know a Lot About Love,” which featured a fife and bari sax. “I thought that’s the greatest combination of instruments. It’s so ludicrous—you’ve got this tiny sparrow of a voice on top and a huge grunting pig-ox of a thing at the bottom,” Bowie said in 1997.) Bonus note: the solo’s descending minor-chord sequence (Bm/A/G/F#) is cited by Wikipedia as an example of the “Andalusian cadence.”

Bowie debuted “Moonage Daydream” on a BBC session of 16 May 1972, and played it in most shows of the Ziggy tour (the performances linked above are from Dunstable, UK (21 June 1972), Santa Monica, Calif. (20 Sept. 1972) and the final Spiders show of 3 July 1973, which features Ronson’s ultimate version of his guitar solo, all delays and feints). It’s turned up in a few tours (mainly the Diamond Dogs tour ’74, and some of Bowie’s ’90s shows) since.

Hang Onto Yourself

Hang Onto Yourself (demo).
Hang Onto Yourself (The Arnold Corns single, 1971).
Hang Onto Yourself (Ziggy Stardust).
Hang Onto Yourself (live, 1972).
Hang Onto Yourself (live, 1973).
Hang Onto Yourself (live, 1978).
Hang Onto Yourself (live, 2004).

America is the noisiest country that ever existed.

Oscar Wilde, Impressions of America.

On 27 January 1971 David Bowie finally came to America. He had dreamed of an entrance like Oscar Wilde’s: Wilde had stepped upon a New York City dock after a cross-Atlantic cruise and was met with a mob of reporters eager for choice witticisms. Instead Bowie had to endure a flight (which he hated) and when he landed at Dulles Airport, with his Lauren Bacall haircut and “wearing a purple maxi-coat and a white chiffon scarf” (Christopher Sandford), he was detained by customs agents, who searched him, sniggered at him and finally released him after an hour. Only Mercury publicist Ron Oberman and his immediate family were there to meet him (here’s a great photo from Bowie’s first night in the U.S., during which Bowie went to a kosher deli in Silver Spring, Md.).

Bowie was in the U.S. to promote The Man Who Sold the World. He brought only his guitar, a satchel of notebooks and few dresses selected by his wife. He went from Washington DC to New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, where he made friends with DJ/scenester Rodney Bingenheimer. He also met RCA house producer Tom Ayers, which set in motion a courtship that culminated in RCA signing Bowie later that year.

The United States of Bowie’s first visit was a fantastically prosperous country that had gone mad and now seemed to be at war with itself. Nineteen seventy-one would see the Attica prison uprising; anti-busing forces in Detroit blowing up school buses with dynamite; a radical group called Movement for Amerika planting bombs in banks across the country; the Weather Underground bombing the U.S. Capitol; another leftist group called Rise planning to poison the Chicago water supply. In Wilmington, NC, a band of vigilantes called Rights of White People assembled. Hippies were occasionally lynched in New Mexico—for example, a sixteen-year-old hippie girl who passed a bad check was shot to death by a storekeeper in Albuquerque (no charges filed). Crime rates hit staggering new levels, fueling a general belief that violence in America had become as common as it was random (in LA, a man drew a gun on Bowie and told him to “kiss my ass”).*

Bowie traveled through America in absorption: listening to top 40 radio (“Rose Garden,” “Stoney End,” “Groove Me”), meeting producers and starlets, gorging on new records (in San Francisco, Bowie heard a Stooges LP for the first time). On sheets of hotel stationery he wrote out his ideas for a fake rock star, inspired by another new find, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Perhaps he’d name the plastic rock singer Iggy.

“Hang Onto Yourself” (or “Hang On To Yourself,” depending which record it’s on) is the fruit of Bowie’s U.S. trip. A rock & roll blast, a groupie sex song, it was first recorded at a session where Bowie met Gene Vincent. Tom Ayers had introduced Bowie and Vincent in LA and, depending on who you believe, Bowie jammed with Vincent on a studio demo of “Hang Onto Yourself,” or Vincent was at the demo session but didn’t play, or Vincent had utterly nothing to do with it. Bowie would use one of Vincent’s signature stage moves (crouching at the mike with his injured leg behind him) in his Ziggy Stardust act; Vincent died of a stomach ulcer some eight months after meeting Bowie.

Rock and roll

Bowie came back to the UK with his demo of “Hang Onto Yourself,” which was still a sketch—just a single verse, a chorus and the makings of what would be the song’s guitar hook. Bowie initially used the song for the first draft of his “fake rock star” project, where he wrote and produced songs for a Dulwich College band The Arnold Corns and their cherubic lead non-singer Freddi Burretti (more on this when we reach “Moonage Daydream”).

The demo and the Corns versions of “Hang Onto Yourself” are plodding and underwritten, and seem to be a botched attempt to mimic the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” (the line “and me, I’m on the radio show” echoes Lou Reed’s “and me, I’m in a rock & roll band”). The Corns single ends with a minute or so of elaborate grunting, suggesting that once again Bowie was parodying Marc Bolan.

“Hang Onto Yourself”‘s main riff (it opens the track and follows the end of the choruses) is also storied plagiarism—it seems to be nicking The Move’s “Fire Brigade,” which in turn had raided Eddie Cochran’s “Something Else.” The tradition continued, as the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” in part ripped off “Hang Onto Yourself” (Glen Matlock admitted the Pistols nicked a number of Spiders riffs, while future Pistols guitarist Steve Jones actually stole the Spiders’ gear, taking the line “the bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar” literally).

Throughout much of 1971 Bowie and his reconstituted band of Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder kept up a brutal rehearsal pace, often playing all night in the top room of a Beckenham pub. Over the months they honed Bowie’s tentative rockers like “Hang Onto Yourself” into hard shapes. The version of “Hang Onto Yourself” cut for the Ziggy Stardust LP is faster and has better dynamics—much of the chord structure has been moved up a step (so the signature riff is now D/C/G, compared with C/Bb/F in the Arnold Corns version), Bowie’s lyric is saucier (“she’s a funky-thigh collector,” “we move like tigers on vaseline”) and Bowie now softly insinuates the chorus, rather than belting it out. Trevor Bolder’s bass holds the track together in a tight grip, while Ronson, in his own words, strapped his guitar on “and thrashed it to death, basically.”

The “Gene Vincent” demo was recorded ca. mid-February 1971 in Los Angeles; the Arnold Corns single was recorded in April 1971 and released as B&C CB149; the Ziggy Stardust track was recorded on 8 November 1971. Much of the Ziggy Stardust record uses rock & roll as a concept more than offering it as a reality—“Hang Onto Yourself” has no such troubles.

It was a classic lead-off song, and Bowie opened most of the Spiders from Mars sets of 1972-1973 with it, as well as many of his 1978 concerts (a Philadelphia recording leads off Stage, the 2-LP live record culled from that tour). Bowie revived “Hang Onto Yourself” on his 1983 tour, letting his rent-a-gun guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan play with it, and brought it back again for his “Reality” tour of the mid-2000s.

Top:  Michael Caine in Get Carter.

* most examples of 1971 America are taken from Rick Perlstein’s essential Nixonland.