A year ago today, I went to the Zeiss Planetarium for a screening of the film, released earlier that month, of David Bowie and band’s final performance as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at the Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. I like planetariums, observatories, and what have you, but given my eyesight I’ve never been much good at looking through them without a guide to show me the way. I was not let down.
The night was as momentous as Bowie—and perhaps Bowie alone—had planned. In one of two evocative pieces for Dig!, Jason Draper describes the show the band developed as one that “blurred the lines between theatre and rock concert.” That Ziggy was a put-on was never in doubt. This performance, nearly the 200th in eighteen months, would wrap not only the tour but the era, as encapsulated by Bowie’s famous parting words to the adoring crowd. Having ridden “Starman” to inescapable fame, he had his first opportunity on this occasion to shapeshift before the eyes of the world. But having sought his place in the industry for years prior, he was practiced at reinvention and knew that the end of one persona was but a doorway to the next, though his cryptic comments may have kept his followers in the dark about that for the time being.
We, the audience in the cinema, were not in the same dark. Watching a concert film in public is a strange experience, observing a crowd observing a show. Though the precise degree of extraordinariness is only conferred retroactively, the people onscreen are anticipating greatness. The atmosphere in the Odeon crackles. The fans are bedecked and made-up and prepared to do whatever they can to achieve physical proximity to their idol. The viewers of the viewers look decidedly different, more pedestrian, but long to be transported by proxy. Some are perhaps the future of those onscreen fans, reflecting from an advanced age, hoping to rekindle the magic of that moment in their lives, if not that year exactly. Others (well, maybe one other) seek connection to a sensibility they never had directly, a changing of the guard for which they were not present.
Luckily for that one other, this show deals in concepts. Bowie and the band begin with the feel, the unadulterated album energy the listeners are after—“Hang On to Yourself” and “Ziggy Stardust”—then immediately broaden out with “Watch That Man,” “All the Young Dudes” (a nod to Bowie’s burgeoning prowess as a producer, this song having singlehandedly resuscitated Mott the Hoople), and “Oh! You Pretty Things.” The first set ends with “Moonage Daydream,” which in turn ends with a blistering solo by Mick Ronson, long enough for Bowie to slink offstage, change, and reappear in a new getup:
The onscreen audience demonstrate their vocal approval. I, for one, am damp even before said costume change.
As if commenting on its predecessor, the next set features “Changes” and the song that started things for Bowie on a large scale, “Space Oddity.” It also includes “My Death,” one of several Jacques Brel numbers (“Amsterdam,” “Les Vieux/Old Folks”) Bowie either recorded or toyed with during the gestation of the post-Hunky Dory project. In these interpretations the artist’s love of symbols comes into full focus: his movements are reminiscent of the mime and Japanese theatre styles that he had so devoutly studied; he seems all but detached from the crowd, projecting himself onto another plane.
The next standout is “Suffragette City,” a return to the down-and-dirty sound of the record. Bowie gears up for what’s to come by really milking the coda, keeping the kids going with its infectious start and stop. There’s “White Light/White Heat,” an open tribute to his hero Lou Reed, which, although it was perhaps written to be noisier than anything the band have played thus far, ends up being sonically on par with the evening. These people know how to pull back; they also know how to let loose.
Crowning the concert, of course, is “Rock & Roll Suicide,” by then a standard closer, but imbued with more meaning and passion than ever before. Bowie’s introduction to it is a reminder that he hasn’t spoken too much, nor too little, over the last couple of hours. In any event, speech couldn’t convey what this number does. He knows it; his fans know it, straining forward to give him their hands as he instructs; I know it, holding tears in my eyes, lightyears away. It lingers, then we forget. But the fact that anybody turned up at all on a hot July night in the future to live, or relive, such a moment is proof enough that some things are not so easily forgotten.
Song rec of the week, ft. a Ronson-worthy guitar solo: “Bubblegum Dog,” MGMT