The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

David Bowie recorded this album in less than three weeks. According to engineer Ken Scott, the majority of performances and vocals were first takes. That pace is almost impossible to reconcile with how complete and visionary the finished record sounds, but that was Bowie in 1972, operating at a creative speed that left everyone around him scrambling to keep up.

The album tells the story of Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual alien rock star who arrives on a dying earth as a messenger of hope, becomes consumed by excess and fame, and is ultimately destroyed by the very audience he came to save. Bowie based the character partly on Vince Taylor, a real British rock singer who had lost his mind on the road and started telling audiences he was the son of God. The whole record was conceived as a narrative, though producer Ken Scott has said that during the actual recording sessions, nobody discussed the concept at all. They just played.

What resulted was the album that invented glam rock and pointed the way toward punk, new wave, and virtually every strain of theatrical rock that followed. "Starman" broke Bowie to a mass audience when he appeared on Top of the Pops that July and draped his arm around Mick Ronson in front of the entire country. "Suffragette City" and "Ziggy Stardust" are two of the most purely exciting rock songs ever recorded. If you have never spent time with this record, you are about to discover one of the great characters in the history of popular music.