Week 1: David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

This is the first post on No one can sing the blues like no one, which takes its title from an Alice Notley poem. Here, Kaden and Liina will discuss our favorite records in memoir, essay, poetry, and visual representation. We have an old yogurt tub inside a customized tissue box cover where we've put red slips of paper with albums titles written on them. We're going to draw one record each week, and make several posts related to it throughout the week. Since we don't have internet at home or at our rented office, this inaugural post is being posted from Le Voyeur in Olympia, Washington, where we're enjoying some beers on a Sunday night, and they're playing a live version of "Going South" by Dead Moon. It's a day late from it's intended launch, because we didn't feel like finding internet in the rain last night.

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by Lifeguard of Love

The first time I ever heard David Bowie, it wasn't David Bowie. It was Glass Candy's b-side to their first single, "Brittle Women" b/w "Hang Onto Yourself". It was shortly before my 17th birthday and I'd recently seen them open for Sleater-Kinney at the all ages club that used to be a gay bar called Nikki's. It is now a gay bar called Jake's. Over the previous year I'd become comfortable going into the punk record store. The single was the only thing they had out at the time. It is now worth $75 on eBay, making it likely the material possession I own with the highest value appreciation.

I've listened to that single more in the past few years than I did circa 2000, so I can't share how I felt about it then. I think I was just into Ida's pink feather boa. I bought one for myself soon after.

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"She wears Adidas shoes and she's one of those girls who's into David Bowie," my BFF and roomie described a classmate she'd be doing her final project with. "She even has David Bowie's name tattooed on her ankle, with some fairies. She's a stoner and she knows about Tracy + the Plastics."

I knew about girls who are into David Bowie. One was in love with me once, but she was a square, and suicidal. I was a fun-loving stoner with a mohawk. We barely spent any time together but she wrote me long letters about how I could be happy without marijuana. The thing was, I was really happy with marijuana.

The first time I met Victoria, I came home from work and she was getting stoned with my roommates. She was wearing Adidas shoes and maybe a baseball style t-shirt with an REO Speedwagon graphic on it. She was nerdy and sweet and loved rock & roll. A later day, we ate mushrooms and went to her dorm. She had a Wendy O Williams photo on her bedroom door and a postcard of Divine with taxidermy eyes glued on. She had a blue tapestry bedspread with elephants and psychedelic flowers in shades of blue. She had a Virgin Megastore bag taped over her smoke detector, like a big red strawberry. She had a trucker hat covered in fake seagull shit. She drew really, really great cartoon-pictures of David Bowie.

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Once in the summer, around middle school, my parents told me I'd like David Bowie. We were out on the boat, a mossy, corroded flat bottomed boat, like a pontoon boat without pontoons. I grew up on lakefront property, but you had to go down a steep path cut through blackberry bushes to get to the lakefront. The shore had sharp, thick grass growing to chest-height. You could only swim if you took the boat out to the middle of the lake and jumped off; the shore was too scummy.

"Liina, I think you'd like Alice Cooper" my dad said.
"No, you mean David Bowie" my mom argued.

It was afternoon, but they'd probably been drinking.

"Which one wears the eye makeup?"
"Which one is Ziggy Stardust?"

They'd been watching Ziggy Stardust on that cable channel called Encore. It was showing with Gimme Shelter. The only part I watched was Tina Turner singing "I've Been Loving You Too Long." It blew my fucking mind. I remember walking in when Ziggy Stardust was playing. It seemed significant but looked boring. I probably went back to my room to read and write and listen to the radio.

(Recently, my parents claimed to have never seen either movie).

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Victoria got the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in the mail when she came home from her first day of eighth grade and I guess it made her who she is. (Did the movie Velvet Goldmine come before or after? I recently met Todd Haynes at a screening and I told him about Victoria, and how all the times she'd tried to show me Velvet Goldmine I'd been really stoned and fell asleep).

I had her play Ziggy Stardust for me once in the car late at night when we were going to pick up my BFF roomie from work half an hour away. I noted "Hang Onto Yourself", because I'd heard it. I noted "John, I'm Only Dancing", because I was a childhood Beatles obsessor. I noted which song was my favorite, but I don't remember which one it was now, because it's not my favorite anymore. I think it was "Lady Stardust".

I was really surprised when Kaden got it on LP several years later that "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "Sweet Head" aren't on the LP, because they seem integral to the experience of the album to me. As someone who is interested in the idea of an album as a unit, I am also slightly ashamed of that. Kaden gave the LP to Victoria and she was really happy. We got another LP copy, later, but mostly when we listen to it we listen to a burned CD copy our friends Evan and Amber gave to us. We can't decide which of them wrote the title on it. My favorite song on it is "Sweet Head." I don't think I've ever told that to anyone before.