I have this memory that I’m not sure about. I don’t know if it happened as I remember it or if the memory is a patchwork, filled in with pattern matching and belief. It could have happened too far in the past for its memory to survive intact.
What I’m pretty sure happened: once, when I was very young, I spent the day with my uncle, a friend of his and his friends’ kids. Something fun was planned which I ended up not participating in. I don’t remember any of the context for this. This is how long ago we’re talking.
What I do remember: I chose to sit something out and listen to music for a long time with my uncle’s friend. It sounded like a good idea to me which surprised my uncle. His reaction was kind of: “…really? Okay. Whatever.”
Then an indeterminate amount of time passed listening to David Bowie live albums. This memory (or whatever it is) has associated colors. David Live was a black backdrop for pulses of dark red, bright red, orange and white. Stage was like a clear and luminous night sky.
If this happened, then it happened so long ago that most of the sensory information hasn’t survived. What I actually do remember is the music and the visual associations it left in my mind.
From my late teens to my early twenties, I became well-acquainted with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, David Live and Stage. With each of them there was a pervading sense of muddled recognition.
I remember distinct eras of believing that the ‘listening to Bowie live albums in the car with this guy’ memory was either real or not. During the belief periods, another notion has a way of showing up. The person I was listening to this music with believed that the studio album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was like a script: something to be acted and interpreted from the outside. This person further believed that the seventies live albums were superior representations of the material.
I don’t remember how or when he would have expressed this. His interpretation was like something known beforehand, in the background of my mind. It feels likely that I overheard a conversation he had with my uncle. What about this script / enactment distinction sounds at all like something that would catch the interested attention of a toddler, though?
In other entries, I’ve said two things: that the Ziggy studio album was a rough draft that benefited from reinterpretation in both Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs. The addition of Mike Garson’s piano on those two albums brings essential depth beside Bowie shifting into interpretive echoes of Ziggy. The impression made, to me, was that Garson was great at crafting musical worlds which Bowie was compelled to inhabit, as a viewpoint character. Same thing happened a few decades later on the 1.Outside album.
After the musical and theatrical superiority of the second and the third of Bowie’s glam trilogy, I’ve also held that the Ziggy studio album does not describe Ziggy’s apparition: what happens is more like a revelatory broadcast from space. The message is heard and the final era of Earth’s existence sees the abrupt rise and fall of a would-be avatar. They are succeeded, perhaps, by others who “heard it to” and are acting accordingly.
This could even play into a metafictive reading of Bowie’s embodiment of Ziggy both on and off stage through Aladdin Sane in ‘73. The film that resulted in the Ziggy live album was the last public appearance of the character. As if David Bowie himself was a secondhand interpreter who “heard it to.”
I still don’t know if that first encounter with Ziggy actually happened or not but I generally lean toward thinking it had. It was simply a powerful auditory memory, leaving auditory information that my brain prioritized to the exclusion of every other detail.
What about the unspoken knowledge of the guy’s interpretation? Well…if you spend a lot of time wondering if something is real, then a selectively-preserved memory can attract a succession of attitudes. Who knows what edits you might make on accident.
But taken at face value: I think I ended up agreeing with the stranger in the long run. I found out, for myself, that studio Ziggy was a skeleton to be fleshed out from other perspectives.
Here’s the intro post
AilixChaerea 