David Bowie may have passed away in 2016, but you would never know it from the stream of reissues that have been released since then. His label, Parlophone, has been steadily releasing multi-disc sets of material that Bowie wrote and recorded in the run-up to his first couple of albums, and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star!” is up next, a five-CD set that sums up his work leading up to 1972’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”
If you’re a Bowie fan and you’re interested in his journey to that completed 1972 classic album, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star!” lays it all out for you as generously as anyone could possibly hope for. According to Super Deluxe Edition, the first disc focuses mainly on Bowie’s demos and rehearsals of “Ziggy Stardust” songs in nascent form.
Discs two and three focus mainly on live recordings made at the BBC in 1972, while disc four contains songs from a live performance in Boston and session recordings that didn’t make the final album. Finally, disc five consists mostly of outtakes, alternate session mixes, and new remixes of classic tracks.
While that should be enough to keep anyone busy for a few months, audiophiles will be happy to learn that the set also includes a Blu-ray disc that contains the original mix of the “Ziggy Stardust” album, its 2003 remix in 5.1 audio, outtakes, and alternate versions. Ultimately, it’s the last word on how this boundary-pushing artist found his way to the fully realized version of this concept album, one that even people who aren’t fans may be familiar with.
Enter Ziggy Stardust
Its status as a concept album owes itself to the Ziggy Stardust character, which Bowie used as an alter ego in the early 1970s to great effect. The story centers around an androgynous, bisexual musician sent to Earth to save it from the impending apocalypse. Since he doesn’t hit you over the head with the concept in the lyrics, even longtime fans might not know that’s what the album is about.
The music, meanwhile, needs no explanation. Almost every single one of the album’s 11 songs is a stone-cold classic, including “Starman” and “Suffragette City,” as well as lesser-known cuts like “Moonage Daydream” and “Hang on to Yourself,” which are no less deserving of classic status. These songs all took the pre-punk glam rock of such artists as T. Rex, elaborated on it, and brought it to the masses in a form that was purely Bowie’s own.
By taking listeners from the initial demo stage to the fully realized incarnations that we all know and love today, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star!” demonstrates that these songs were not thrown together in a haphazard fashion. It was a process, one that Bowie used to fine-tune his vision over the course of a year. If the iconic “Ziggy Stardust” album has figured into your life in a prominent way, this overflowing box set should provide you with a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the journey he took to create it.
If there’s any caveat to keep in mind, it’s that this set is not that cheap. Purportedly marked down from $140, it’s currently available from Amazon for a hefty $105, which translates to over $17 per disc. If that’s too rich for your blood, there’s also a vinyl edition with just 14 songs, currently available for a much less risible $23.99.
Cost aside, we recommend splashing out for the deluxe version. This package is intended for the person who worshipped Bowie since adolescence and has worn out multiple copies of the original “Ziggy” album. If that sounds like you, we recommend “forgetting” to pay the phone bill this month and picking up the box set instead. People can always call back when your service is turned back on in July.
This story was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.
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Our Favorite Albums That Are Turning 30 This Year
Time flies when you’re having fun, and while a lot of the music made in 1994 is the furthest thing on earth from fun, that year saw some genuinely classic albums released. These albums have held up well, and we go back to them over and over again, just as we did decades ago.
Although three decades have passed since these classic albums were released, they feel as vital and relevant as they did on the first listen, and people are ignoring their 1994 vintage entirely and going back for repeat listens to this day. Here are our choices for the ones we can’t believe have just turned 30.
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Release date: March 8, 1994
Soundgarden had turned out reliably heavy alternative music since the late 1980s, but 1994’s “Superunknown” was their biggest hit and contains songs like the title track and “Black Hole Sun.” Lead singer Chris Cornell sadly passed away in 2017, but here you can hear him in all his full-throated glory when he was one of the best singers on earth.
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Release date: January 28, 1994
The album that brought punk rock to suburbia has been legally eligible to purchase alcohol in the United States for the past nine years, assuming albums could do such a thing. Sure, they’re just copying Stiff Little Fingers and other bands who did punk rock much better than this Bay Area trio, but songs like ‘Basket Case’ are hard to deny.
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Release date: March 8, 1994
Just as Green Day brought punk rock to suburbia, Nine Inch Nails brought industrial music to the same crowd. It had a significant effect on the rest of the music released in the following years – suddenly, every heavy metal band struggling to remain relevant filled their music with lots of abrupt mechanical noises. That trend passed, but man, it hung around for a long time.
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Release date: August 23, 1994
“Grace” is the only album Jeff Buckley completed in his lifetime, but if you could leave only one record behind when you slip this mortal coil, this would be a good one to go out on. It features his rendition of “Hallelujah,” and even though many different artists have sung that song countless times, his is arguably the definitive version.
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Release date: November 1, 1994
“MTV Unplugged in New York” was the first Nirvana album to be released after the passing of frontman Kurt Cobain. Considering the manner of his passing, it’s a pretty chilling performance, and when you listen to it now, it sounds very much like the last will and testament of a person who knows they won’t be with us much longer.
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Release date: November 15, 1994
Even if you didn’t like R&B music, it was hard not to like “Waterfalls,” the big hit song off TLC’s “CrazySexyCool” album. Thirty years later, it still hasn’t overstayed its welcome, and you can hear all the drunks shrieking it off-key every karaoke night, a sign of its enduring strength.
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Release date: October 3, 1994
The Cranberries had a pretty unique sound, characterized by hits like “Zombie,” which are admittedly still a little hard to categorize. Lead singer Dolores O’Riordan sadly passed away in 2018, and the band released the music she had left behind on 2019’s “In the End” before permanently disbanding.
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Release date: January 25, 1994
“Jar of Flies” was considered the “acoustic album” by metal-grunge heavyweights Alice in Chains, and yes, it’s a largely hushed affair. It also happens to be the best thing they ever released, and it resonates in your head long after it’s ended. The instrumental “Whale and Wasp” is especially engaging.
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Release date: May 10, 1994
If anyone can explain the mysteriously durable popularity of Weezer to us, we’re all ears. They burst onto the scene with “Weezer (The Blue Album)” and have attracted a maniacally devoted fan base ever since people who want to hear “Buddy Holly” loud and often. Those fans have been that way for 30 years and show no signs of losing interest even now as they crowd 60.
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Release date: September 27, 1994
“Monster” rocked a little harder than previous R.E.M. albums, leading many longtime fans to accuse them of committing the heinous act of “selling out.” They were already packing stadiums at that point, so it’s hard to see a higher level of selling out that they could have embraced. In reality, this band got popular through relentless touring and making albums that people really enjoyed, even if that bummed out their earliest fans, whom we advise to go home and listen to “Driver 8” like none of this ever happened.
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Release date: November 1, 1994
“Wildflowers” is Tom Petty’s greatest album, and he’s a guy whose career is full of great albums. While every one of his records has at least two or three songs that make them keepers, this one consists of nothing but classic song after classic song, as typified by “You Don’t Know How It Feels” and “Crawling Back to You.” In the compact disc era, this was one CD that never left the player, because why bother? You were only going to listen to “Wildflowers” over and over again.
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Release date: April 12, 1994
Sometimes, horrible timing works in your favor. In the case of Courtney Love’s band Hole, her husband, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, died by suicide on April 5, 1994, and Hole’s major-label debut, “Live Through This,” came out one week later while Nirvana fans were still reeling. We don’t want to suggest that “Live Through This” exploited that tragedy for robust album sales, as that would be untoward and unseemly. Having said that, something made it sell 1.6 million copies in the United States.
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Release date: April 26, 1994
When Johnny Cash made “American Recordings,” a sparse collection of songs made with producer Rick Rubin, he had already been written off years earlier as a has-been and a relic of decades past. It turned out that leaning into his grizzled, elder-statesman persona as hard as possible was precisely the right move, and the album – which sounds like a bunch of demos – completely reinvigorated his career. He made several similar albums with Rubin until his death in 2003, and they all sound utterly timeless today. They will also inspire you to explore Cash’s back catalog, which is one the finest in the history of recorded music.
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Release date:August 22, 1994
Trip-hop, a genre that combines hip-hop with slow tempos and lots of breathy atmospheres, was pioneered in the 1990s by artists like Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead, whose 1994 debut album “Dummy” is still very compelling and remains utterly unique, even within the trip-hop genre. It’s a good thing that album holds up as well as it does since Portishead has made three studio albums in 30 years, so there’s not much of a marathon you can do with their catalog. You can, however, just play “Dummy” repeatedly, as people did 30 years ago and continue to do today.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.
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