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David Bowie: 'Aladdin Sane' (released on this day in 1973)
On April 13, 1973, "Aladdin Sane", David Bowie's sixth studio album and the sequel to his great success "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars", was released in the United Kingdom, making it his first work written as a great rock star. Bowie described it simply as "Ziggy travels to America".
In fact, most of the songs are written while he was celebrating his 1972 US tour and Alladin picks up where Zigy left off and offers the brutal tale of a Martian rocker's meteoric rise to the top. If in "Ziggy Stardust", the cover showed the arrival of a strange young man (alien?) with his guitar in a gutted alley of an old city, harassed by cars, garbage, and humidity, in the case of "Aladdin Sane", the emblem shows more precisely the intentions of the album.
Against an empty, stripped background, the aggressive face of a mutant emerges – Bowie with his face pierced by a red and blue ray – in the abstract line of what was Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange". For a similar metaphor about violence and sex on a social level.
Most of the songs were recorded at Trident Studios in London, taking advantage of the breaks in the tour, under the production of Ken Scott, who had been the sound engineer on the recordings of the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" and "White Album". As in Ziggy, Mick Ronson has as much prominence as Bowie. In the opening topic,'Watch that man' he attacks with guitars reminiscent of Keith Richards, as well as the whole arrangement of the song, very 'Stones'. Here Bowie demonstrated his change of musical direction, tending towards a more 'dirty' sound.
'Aladdin sane' is one of the most accomplished pieces of the album. A ballad posed by an excellent dialogue between David's sax and the piano dissonances of the band"s recent signing, keyboardist Mike Garson. Heavily influenced by the doo-wop of the fifties, “Drive-in Saturday” describes how the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world have forgotten how to reproduce, and need to watch old porn movies to regain lost habits. This theme has been cited to illustrate Bowie's “futuristic nostalgia”, in which the story is told from the perspective of a future dweller looking back in time. Bowie was inspired while crossing the Arizona desert by train, and the strange nature of the terrain gave him the idea of a land devastated by a nuclear catastrophe. The lyrics feature Mick Jagger, Twiggy and Carl Jung, and it was one of the songs chosen to appear as a single.
"Panic in Detroit", based on Iggy Pop's descriptions of Bowie of the revolutionary activists he met when he was younger in Michigan, for others refers to the 1967 street riots in Detroit. As Rolling Stone described it at the time: "The paranoia of the big motorized city". A heavy rock in which Mick Ronson's guitar sounds like Godzilla entering Suffragette City and the drummer earns his own, tirelessly maintaining the panic until an end to all chaos. On a hard-rock basis, “Cracked Actor” is a corrosive, paranoid and ironic vision of alienation and sexual vanity in the world of cinema and its stars, which contains numerous allusions to sex and drugs:
"Crack, baby, crack, show me you're real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you're knocking me dead".
This was one of the four songs that Spanish censorship did not allow to be released at the time, so the album did not see the light of day in Spain until 1976. The B-side opens with 'Time' a song with an atmosphere of old French cabaret, in which Mike Garson mixes the piano style of the 20s with avant-garde styles and Brechtian touches. Bowie recites, exasperates and overacts, gasps, breathes, and Ronson's piano and guitar put the Seine and London in dialogue:
Time, he's waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things
His script is you and me, boy
Time, he flexes like a whore
Falls wanking to the floor
His trick is you and me, boy
Time, in quaaludes and red wine
Demanding Billy Dolls
And other friends of mine
Take your time
'The prettiest star', it was composed three years earlier and recorded by David with Marc Bolan on guitar, with whom Bowie would begin to dispute the title of 'king of glam' in the following years. Tony Visconti, the producer of that session commented: 'Everything was going well until June, Bolan's wife, came and said to Bowie: Marc is too good to play with you'. For 'Alladin Sane', the song was re-recorded and Ronson copied Bolan's guitar note by note.
'Let's spend the night together', in addition to Ronson's Richards sound on several tracks, it is another nod to the Stones and foreshadows their next work, 'Pin-Ups', their album of covers. David accelerates the original rhythm lightheartedly, although some are not quite convinced: 'A fragile, brittle and effeminate version of one of the most clearly heterosexual rock screams, turning it into a dubious bisexual anthem' (Rolling Stone).
'The jean genie' had already appeared as a single in November 1972 reaching No. 2 on the charts and describes a character inspired by his friend Iggy Pop in a very Velvet Underground lyrical style and a guitar-driven R&B riff that is too reminiscent of Bo Diddley's “I'm a Man" in a version by the Yardbirds. The album closes with the shocking "Lady grinning soul", inspired by Bowie's first meeting with the American vocalist Claudia Lennear and sometimes compared to the themes of James Bond, which Garson decorates with his characteristic jazz piano bursts sprinkled with Liszt.
"Aladdin Sane" definitely catapults David to the whole world. He travels to Japan, conquers the audience and is conquered by Kabuki theater, which incorporates sophisticated to its expressive means. He returns home on the Trans-Siberian – Bowie is a science fiction fantasist who is afraid to travel by plane – he crosses Siberia and the USSR and stays two days in Moscow. Where he witnesses the parade in Red Square on May 1st. He continues his journey to Paris on the Orient Express and upon his arrival he flaunts his bisexuality and declares himself an admirer of the work of Jacques Brel. The headlines of the Parisian press anticipate the apotheosis of the reception of their London fans.
David Bowie 1973 'The Jean Genie' Top Of The Pops January 3rd
Track listing
All tracks are written by David Bowie, except "Let's Spend the Night Together", written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Watch That Man" | 4:30 |
| 2. | "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)" | 5:15 |
| 3. | "Drive-In Saturday" | 4:38 |
| 4. | "Panic in Detroit" | 4:30 |
| 5. | "Cracked Actor" | 3:01 |
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 6. | "Time" | 5:10 |
| 7. | "The Prettiest Star" | 3:28 |
| 8. | "Let's Spend the Night Together" | 3:10 |
| 9. | "The Jean Genie" | 4:06 |
| 10. | "Lady Grinning Soul" | 3:53 |
Personnel
- David Bowie – lead vocals, guitar, harmonica, saxophone, synthesiser, Mellotron
- Mick Ronson – guitar, piano, backing vocals
- Trevor Bolder – bass guitar
- Mick "Woody" Woodmansey – drums
- Mike Garson – piano
- Ken Fordham – saxophone
- Brian "Bux" Wilshaw – saxophone, flutes
- Juanita "Honey" Franklin – backing vocals
- Linda Lewis – backing vocals
- G.A. MacCormack – backing vocals
Production
- David Bowie – producer, arrangements
- Ken Scott – producer, engineer, mixer
- Mick Moran – engineer
- Mick Ronson – arrangements, mixer