David Bowie Aladdin Sane Poll. Pick Your Favourites & Discuss.

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Bobby Morrow, Apr 11, 2018.

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  1. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    Aladdin Sane is the sixth studio album by English musician David Bowie, released by RCA Records on 13 April 1973. The follow-up to his breakthrough The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, it was the first album he wrote and released from a position of stardom.[2]


    [​IMG]
    Studio album by David Bowie
    Released
    13 April 1973
    Recorded 6 October 1972, 4–11 December 1972, c. 18–24 January 1973
    Studio Trident Studios, London and RCA Studios, New York and Nashville

    Singles from Aladdin Sane
    1. "The Jean Genie"
      Released: 24 November 1972
    2. "Drive-In Saturday"
      Released: 6 April 1973
    3. "Time"
      Released: 13 April 1973
    4. "Let's Spend the Night Together"
      Released: July 1973
    NME editors Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray called the album "oddly unsatisfying, considerably less than the sum of the parts",while Bowie encyclopedist Nicholas Peggdescribes it as "one of the most urgent, compelling and essential" of his releases.The Rolling Stone review by Ben Gerson pronounced it "less manic than The Man Who Sold The World, and less intimate than Hunky Dory, with none of its attacks of self-doubt."The album cover featuring a lightning bolt across his face is regarded as one of Bowie's most iconic images.

    In 2003, the album was ranked among six Bowie entries on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time (at #277) and was later ranked No. 77 on Pitchfork Media's list of the top 100 albums of the seventies.

    Aladdin Sane was released in the UK on 13 April 1973 With a purported 100,000 copies ordered in advance,the album debuted at the top of the UK charts and reached No. 17 in America, making it Bowie's most successful album commercially in both countries to that date. The album is estimated to have sold 4.6 million copies worldwide, making it one of Bowie's highest-selling LPs. The Guinness Book of British Hit Albums notes that Bowie "ruled the (British) album chart, accumulating an unprecedented 182 weeks on the list in 1973 with six different titles."

    Critical reaction was generally laudatory, if more enthusiastic in the US than in the UK.Rolling Stone remarked on "Bowie's provocative melodies, audacious lyrics, masterful arrangements (with Mick Ronson) and production (with Ken Scott)",while Billboard called it a combination of "raw energy with explosive rock". In the British music press, however, letters columns accused Bowie of 'selling out' and Let it Rock magazine found the album to be more style than substance, considering that he had "nothing to say and everything to say it with".Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote a few years later that his favorite Bowie album had been Aladdin Sane, "the fragmented, rather second-hand collection of elegant hard rock songs (plus one Jacques Brel-style clinker) that fell between the Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs concepts. That Bowie improved his music by imitating the Rolling Stones rather than by expressing himself is obviously a tribute to the Stones, but it also underlines how expedient Bowie's relationship to rock and roll has always been."

    Thanks Wikipedia!:)

    I wish I could say I bought Aladdin Sane in April 1973 along with everyone else, but it took me another 25 years to pick it up! I liked Bowie’s singles in the 70s, started buying his albums in the 80s and began backtracking to his classic releases in the 90s.:) To be honest, Bowie scared me a little in 1973.. I found album covers like Aladdin Sane and Pinups a bit creepy. I wish I had gotten into him earlier as I could have filled my formative years with much better music than I was listening to.:D

    Aladdin Sane has always been my favourite Bowie album. I took to it immediately. Often his works take a while to sink in. If they ever do at all.:) Not so with this. I know it’s not his best album in the eyes of fans, but it’s the one I play most so I thought I’d see what everyone else thought of it.

    So, what do you think of it?:) Tell your stories of hearing/buying the album for the first time and what it means to you now. All the usual poll options are here. Pick as many songs as you like. I’ll add some old reviews and adverts too if I can.
     
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  2. Uncle Miles

    Uncle Miles Wafting in and out of Forum

    Location:
    Phoenix, AZ USA
    Panic In Detroit my fave from that album
     
  3. Malcolm Crowne

    Malcolm Crowne Forum Habitue

    Location:
    Portland OR
    Drive In Saturday --- would win even if the song consisted only of the line "When people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored" !!!
     
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  4. California Couple

    California Couple dislike us on facebook

    Location:
    Newport Beach
    Top 5:
    Watch That Man
    Drive In Saturday
    Panic In Detroit
    The Jean Genie
    Lady Grinning Soul
     
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  5. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

  6. California Couple

    California Couple dislike us on facebook

    Location:
    Newport Beach
    For me this is Bowie's second greatest album, after Ziggy of course. Far better than Man and Dory.
     
  7. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    NME review from 1973.

    Aladdin Sane - Brainful of Bowie
    by Charles Shaar Murray - New Musical Express (14 April 1973)

    Bye-bye, Ziggy. It was nice seeing you, and I hope you'll keep in touch. Hello, Aladdin Sane, make yourself at home. David Bowie's new album is just about ready for you, and with it comes a whole new set of hypotheses, poses, masks, games, glimpses, put-ons, take-offs and explored possibilities. More prosaically: one new record, nine David Bowie compositions (two slightly used) and mildly outrageous reworking of "Let's Spend The Night Together".

    Three months ago, I sat on the floor in the mixing room at Trident Studio's in the company of David Bowie, Mick Ronson, Ken Scott and sundry others and heard the bulk of this album hot off the tapes. Since then I've carried the memory of it around with me, waiting to hear it again and see how accurately I'd remembered it.

    Even with that preparation, it's still quite a brainful to assimilate at one hurried mental gulp. In an ideal world, one could give it a fortnight's uninterrupted listening before attempting to tell anyone about it, but as you may have noticed if you've been reading the papers, we do not live in anything even vaguely approaching an ideal world. So, for the better or for worse, here are a few snap impressions on my first day with "Aladdin Sane".

    Firstly, the cover, which will be a definite asset to any chic home. You'll see it strewn on Axminster carpets in expensive colour supplement stereo ads, and carried with token attempts at unobtrusiveness under the arms of the fashionable.

    On the front is a head and shoulders shot of David with blush-pink make-up and a startling red and blue lightning bolt painted across his face and a small pool of liquid behind one collar-bone. Inside, with more lightning bolts, is David nude, but with a silver-grey solarisation that hides the naughty bits. Somewhere in the process he's lost his feet, which was hopefully not too painful.

    So you play the record. Immediately Mick Ronson's guitar roars out of the speakers, and you're sucked straight into "Watch That Man", a nightmare party sequence straight out of Dylan's "Ballad Of A Thin Man", where "There was an old-fashioned band of married men/looking up to me for encouragement - it was so-so". It's a nice, tough opener.

    With the title song, Bowie sets to in earnest. Its full title is "Aladdin Sane (1913/1939/197?)". It will be noted that the first two dates marked the prelude of two world wars, and the third - well, have you checked the papers lately? It's the first real outing for pianist Mike Garson, who spans time and place like most pianists span octaves. Imagine Cecil Taylor playing in a '30s night-club the day after the atomic catastrophe, and you may have some idea of what Garson lays down. Aladdin, it appears, is going off to fight: "Passionate bright young things take him away to war," sings David with a kind of deadpan melancholy, as Ronson's guitar howls like a wolf with its foot caught in a trap and Garson's ornately menacing piano tinkles like the very fabric of existence itself slowly shattering into icy splinters. Would you believe the most unusual anti-war song of all time? Well, that's only track two.

    As Garson hammers his final chord, we're straight into "Drive-In Saturday", with which you're probably already familiar. So let's rush headlong into "Panic In Detroit", which recalls the Stones just a little bit, and the Yardbirds are in there as well, courtesy of Mick Ronson's Beckish guitar. It's a faintly impressionistic tale of a revolutionary group wiped out by the police, and it may refer to the Ann Arbor White Panthers and John Sinclair. The title is endlessly reiterated. Finally for the first side, "Cracked Actor", which is about an elderly movie star who picks up a young girl, thinking that she wants him for his fame and not realising that she thinks he's her smack connection. The spirit of Lou Reed hangs over this track as David sings: "Crack baby crack, show me you're real/Smack, baby smack, is all that you feel/Suck, baby, suck, give me your head/Before you start professing that you're knocking me dead."

    The first track on side two is "Time", intellectually the heaviest thing on the album. Like "Aladdin" itself, it features Garson up front. If "Ziggy Stardust" was David's "Clockwork orange" album this is his "Cabaret" and the '30s vamp behind the voice makes the lyrics even more sinister than they might otherside seem. Only David Bowie could sing the words "We should be on by now" and make them imply that somehow mankind has taken a wrong turning. Not making way for the Homo Superior perhaps?

    "The Prettiest Star" was written three years ago and issued as the follow-up single to "Space Oddity" on Mercury, but it was deleted and never issued on an album. Here, it's been re-recorded. It's a light little song dedicated to Angie, and serves as a wind-down period after the intensity of "Time".

    Hot on its heels is David's own reading of Mick n' Keith's "Let's Spend The Night Together", as premiered at the Rainbow, with Garson playing the riff in augmented chords and David doing an Eno on Moog. It rips and snorts just like it ought to, and then we're into "Jean Genie Revisited" before the closer "Lady Grinning Soul", which shows that even when David's sentimental, he's doing it in style.

    The above notes are first impressions. The album's changed slightly since I first heard the tapes in that the recut "John I'm Only Dancing" has been replaced by "Let's Spend The Night Together", originally intended as the B-side of "Drive-In Saturday", and a then incomplete track called "Zion" has been replaced by "Lady Grinning Soul". After some more concentrated listening, some different things might emerge, and in that event I'll take some space later to discuss them.

    Meanwhile, how does it stack up against its predecessors? I don't know. David Bowie's last three albums have become so deeply embedded in my head that it takes considerable effort to integrate a successor into that patch of brain cells that store his music. One thing I know is that "Aladdin Sane" is probably the album of the year, and a worthy contribution to the most important body of musical work produced in this decade.
     
  8. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    Melody Maker review from April 1973.

    Aladdin's lamp burns bright ... but cold
    by A.L. - Melody Maker (19 April 1973)

    DAVID BOWIE: "Aladdin Sane" (RCA Victor). Homo superior or The Man Who Fooled The World? I'm beginning to wonder.

    Oh, he's good all right. Image-wise, he carries it all off with a dazzling, effortless sense of style which makes every-other band in the glam/glitter/outrage/theatre-rock field look like something out of a Camping For Beginners. And musically, he and Mick Ronson and Mick Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder and the rest are light-years ahead in their cruel precision.

    But how deep does it go? Is David Bowie really saying anything much at all? As Ziggy Stardust, rock and roller, he gets it on, no doubt about it. But judged against the standards of the astral image which he and his followers have nurtured - the whole Starman, Stranger In A Strange Land aura - his achievements have been disappointing.

    This was brought home forcibly the other week by Bowie's appearance on the Russell Harty TV show. While he was singing he was perfect: the whole scintillating bisexual image, guaranteed to throw the entire population of straight Britain into panic. And musically, he and the band were machine-tooled perfection. But as soon as he sat down to talk, the whole image dissolved like runny mascara. What he had to say was in no way futuristic, or profound, or controversial. He was as The Prettiest Starlet.

    It's not that I expect profundity from a rock star. But when your songs deal in cosmic concepts you are inviting judgement at a pretty high level. And the sad truth is that five minutes of a film like 2001 or one chapter of Asimov or Clarke says more about what Man can or will become than the entire body of Bowie's "futuristic" songs.

    It's the same story with this latest album, which is superficially stunning and ultimately frustrating. The title is a pun, of course, and a deadly accurate one: the lyrics are more intense, more strung-out, more fragmented than anything he's done before: splintered nightmare images of a journey across America. At times the lyrics reach that level of obscurity which it is fashionable to describe as "oblique" but which sound to me merely confused and hastily thrown together.

    Musically, the songs are executed with a brutal panache which puts this album closer to satanic "The Man Who Sold The World" than "Hunky Dory" or "Ziggy Stardust." Melodically the songs have Bowie's usual flair - "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday" have already proved themselves as singles and most of the others here are just as catchy, especially "The Prettiest Star," a very poppy reworking of an old song from "Space Odyssey" days. "Watch That Man" and "Panic In Detroit" are stormers with a strong Rolling Stones feel - although Bowie's version of "Let's Spend The Night Together" is very un-Stonesy, precise and asexual. "Cracked Actor" is probably the most successful cut: a vividly powerful tale of Hollywood, heroin and sexual cruelty. But the two key works here, I suppose, are the title track and "Time." Both have a strained alienated feel, heightened by the fractured jagged piano of new man Mike Garson, but the lyrics promise far more than they actually deliver - which is the way I feel about the whole album.

    There is much to dazzle the eye and ear, but little to move the mind or heart. It is clever, but icy cold, and I have a feeling that the songs here will not be long remembered.

    But maybe that's the way Mr Bowie wants it, as he makes his plans to go into movies and talks about farewell tours. Perhaps, as his spirit Andy Warhol once said, everybody should be famous for just 15 minutes.
     
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  9. California Couple

    California Couple dislike us on facebook

    Location:
    Newport Beach
    I always thought this album came out in June 1973, because that was the first time I had heard of it.
     
  10. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    Lengthy review from Rolling Stone.

    Review of the Aladdin Sane album

    by Ben Gerson - Rolling Stone (19 July 1973)

    A lightning bolt streaks across David's face; on the inside cover the lad is air-brushed into androgyny, a no less imposing figure for it. Though he has been anointed to go out among us and spread the word, we find stuffed into the sleeve, like dirty underwear, a form requesting our name, address, 'favourite film and TV stars', etc., plus $3.50 for membership of the David Fan Club (materials by return mail unspecified).

    [​IMG] [​IMG]

    The original LP release included a David Bowie Fan Club membership form as above.

    Such discrepancies have made David Bowie the most recently controversial of all significant pop artists - all of it owing to the confusion of levels on which he operates. His flamboyant drive for pop star status has stamped him in many people's eyes a naked opportunist and poseur. But once it is recognised that stardom represents a metaphysical quest for Bowie, one has to grant at least that the question of self-inflation is in his case unconventional.

    The twin impulses are to be a star (i.e. Jagger) and to be a star (i.e. Betelgeuse). The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars depicted an impending doomsday, an extraterrestrial visitation and its consequences for rock and society. Although never so billed, Ziggy was a rock opera, with plot, characters, and musical and dramatic momentum. Aladdin Sane, in far less systematic fashion, works over the same themes - issuance's from the Bowie schema which dates back to The Man Who Sold The World. Bowie is cognisant that religion's geography - the heavens - has been usurped, either by science or by actual beings.

    If by conventional lights Bowie is a lad insane, then as an Aladdin, a conjurer of supernatural forces, he is quite sane. The titles may change from album to album - from the superman, the Homo superior, Ziggy, to Aladdin - but the vision, and Bowie's rightful place in it, remain constant. The pun of the title, alternately vaunted an dismissive, plays on his own sense of discrepancy. Which way you read it depends upon whether you are viewing the present from the eyes of the past or the future.

    Bowie's programme is not complete, but it involves the elimination of gender differences, the inevitability of Armageddon, and the conquering of death and time as we know them. Stardom is the means towards attaining a vantage point from which to foresee, and an elevation from which to lead. The awesome powers and transformations civilisation associates with heaven and hell will be unleashed on earth.

    [​IMG]

    The title song is this album's "Five Years". Ominously, within parentheses after the title, are the dates '1913-1938-197?'. The first two are the years before the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, respectively, and we have no reason to think that 197? represents anything but a year prior to the date of the third. The music is hothouse orientalism, jagged, dissonant and daring, yet also wistful and backward-looking. Phrases like 'battle cries and champagne' evoke images of earlier, more romantic wars. The impatient chug of the machine (the electric guitar) gently clashes with the wilder, more extreme flailings of a dying culture (the piano). We have been deposited in the realm of Ives and Stravinsky.

    Mike Garson's long piano solo is fabulously imaginative and suggestive, incorporating snatches of Rhapsody In Blue and 'Tequila'. The reference to sake, the Japanese drink, in the first verse, and the last verse's 'Millions weep a fountain/Just in case of sunrise' suggest the land of the rising sun as a potentially significant future locale. While writing this album, Bowie decided to tour Japan (where he has recently been performing), and Ziggy was described on the last album as 'like some cat from Japan'. The relationship of Aladdin's visitations to the outbreak of war is not clear. Is it his appearance, or our failure to embrace him, which plunges us into strife?

    Although a good portion of the songs on Aladdin Sane are hard rock-and-roll, a closer inspection reveals them to be advertisements for their own obsolescence - vignettes in which the baton is being passed on to a newer sensibility. 'Watch That Man', the album's opening number, is inimitable Stones, Exile vintage. Mick Ronson plays Chuck Berry licks via Keith Richard, Garson plays at being Nicky Hopkins, Bowie slurs his lines, and the female back-up singers and horns make the appropriate noises. Like Ziggy, one of the subjects of Aladdin Sane is rock-and-roll (and its lynchpin, sex), only here it is extended to include its ultimate exponents, The Stones.

    Taking up the warning he gave in 'Changes' - 'Look out you rock-and-rollers/Pretty soon you're gonna get a little older' - David presents 'an old-fashioned band of married men/Looking up to me for encouragement'. To emphasise the archaism of these fellows, there are references to Benny Goodman and 'Tiger rag'. Jagger himself has become so dainty 'that he could eat you with a fork and spoon'.

    'Let's Spend The Night Together' continues The Stones preoccupation. Here, one of the most ostensibly heterosexual calls in rock is made into a bi-anthem: The cover version is a means to an ultimate revisionism. The rendition here is campy, butch, brittle and unsatisfying. Bowie is asking us to re-perceive 'Let's Spend The Night Together' as a gay song, possibly from its inception. Sexual ambiguity in rock has existed long before any audience was attuned to it. However, though Bowie's point is well taken, his methods are not.

    'Drive-In Saturday' was conceived during Bowie's passage through the Arizona desert. It is a fantasy in which the populace, after some terrible holocaust, has forgotten how to make love. To learn again they take courses at the local drive-in, where they view films in which 'like once before... people stared in Jagger's eyes and scored'.

    'Panic in Detroit' places us right in the middle of a battered urban scape. Ronson deals out a compelling Bo Didley beat which quickly leads into a helter-skelter descending scale. The song is a paranoid descendant of the Motor City's earlier masterpiece, Martha and the Vandellas' 'Nowhere To Run'. The hero is 'the only survivor of the National People's Gang', the revolutionary as star (shades of Sinclair), Che as wall poster. By the end of the song, all that is left to claim his revolutionary immortality is a suicide note, an 'autograph' poignantly inscribed 'Let me collect dust'.

    Rock and revolutionary stardom are not the only varieties which are doomed. In his work Bowie is often contemptuous of actors, yet his is, above all, an actor. His intent on 'Cracked Actor', a portrait of an ageing screen idol, vicious, conceited, mercenary, the object of the ministrations of a male gigolo, is to strip the subject of his validity, as he has done with the rocker, as a step towards a re-definition of these roles and his own inhabiting of them. The homosexuality of 'Cracked Actor' is not, as elsewhere, ground-breaking and affirmative, but rather decadent and sick. 'The Prettiest Star', the album's other slice of cinematic life, again asserts the connection between secular and celestial stardom. But the song itself is too self-consciously vaudeville.

    'Time' is a bit of Brecht/Weill, a bit of Brel. All the world's not a stage, but a dressing room, in which Time holds sway, exacts payment. Once we're on, as in all theatres, time is suspended and will no longer be 'Demanding Billy Dolls' - a reference to the death of Billy Murcia in London last summer.

    The appeal to an afterlife, or its equivalent, which is implied in this song, using the theatre as its metaphor, is further clarified in 'Lady Grinning Soul'. The song is beautifully arranged; Ronson's guitar, both six-string and twelve, elsewhere so muscular, is here, except for some faulty intonation on the acoustic solo, very poetic. Bowie, a ballad singer at heart, which lends his rock singing its special edge, gives 'Lady Grinning Soul' the album's most expansive and sincere vocal.

    The seeming contradictions intrinsic to this album and the body of the last four albums are exasperating, yet the outlines are sufficiently legible to establish the records from The Man Who Sold The World to Aladdin as reworkings of the same obsessions - only the word 'obsession smacks too much of psychological enslavement. Partly, the difficulty derives from the very private language Bowie employs; partly, I suspect, it is the function of a very canny withholding of information. Each album seems to advance the myth, but perhaps it is only a matter of finding new metaphors for the same message, packing more and more reality (in Aladdin's case, the America Bowie discovered on tour) into his scheme, universalising it.

    Aladdin is less manic than The Man Who Sold The World, and less intimate than Hunky Dory, with none of its attacks of self-doubt. Ziggy in turn, was less autobiographically revealing, more threatening than its predecessors, but still compact. Like David's Radio City Music Hall show, Aladdin is grander, more produced: David is, more than ever, more mastermind than participant. Aladdin's very eclecticism makes it even less exposed, conceptually, than Ziggy. Three of the track 'The Prettiest Star', 'Let's Spend The Night Together' and the related 'The Jean Genie', are inferior, they lack the obdurate strength of the remaining songs, not to mention the perfection of Hunky Dory and Ziggy The calmness of the former, the inexorability of the latter (which managed to subsume the question of each individual song's merit) are not Aladdin Sane's.

    You needn't buy the mumbo-jumbo to accept Bowie's provocative melodies, audacious lyrics, masterful arrangements (with Mick Ronson) and production (with Ken Scott). As a strictly musical figure Bowie is of major importance. His remoteness, his stubbornness, do not describe a man at the mercy of the media or his audience, ready to alter his course at their behest, but one who wills them to do his bidding - the arrogance of the true believer. David has organised his career according to a schedule to which he steadfastly adheres. With Time waiting in the wings, an apocalypse near at hand, he lacks the freedom to tamper with it.

    Certainly there is a general sense of oncoming catastrophe afoot in the land; many of his other concerns enjoy equal currency. But Bowie, uniquely among the pop musicians of today, sees them as the province of popular music (and popular music, by extension, as a world-shaking force). He is attempting to seize hold of these questions with the energy and commitment The Beatles and Dylan evinced towards their areas of concern in the sixties. With the benefit of hindsight, he seeks the kind of power The Beatles and Dylan had to discover they could have. However, it is not his goal just to return music to its stature as more than music. With the benefit of hindsight, it is to take it one step further.
     
  11. NightGoatToCairo

    NightGoatToCairo Forum Resident

    Location:
    .
    An excellent album but not nearly his best of the 69-74 period. That honor goes to Hunky Dory & Diamond Dogs. Get rid of the wretched Stones cover and The Prettiest Star, replace with John (Sax Version) and Dudes - bingo!

    Lady Grinning Soul is one of my all-time favourite Bowie songs. The rest are excellent. The artwork is fab.
     
  12. NightGoatToCairo

    NightGoatToCairo Forum Resident

    Location:
    .
    :buttkick:
     
  13. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    Perhaps it came out later in America? The Rolling Stone review is from July 1973, so you could be right.
     
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  14. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    [​IMG]
    I love the whole album as much as Hunky Dory and Ziggy. One of the greatest albums of all time.
     
  15. jimod99

    jimod99 Daddy or chips?

    Location:
    Ottawa, ON
    ......and being reissued next week on silver vinyl!

    Drive In Saturday was the very first Bowie single I bought as a 10 year old, and started a life long love of the great man.
     
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  16. leshafunk

    leshafunk Forum Resident

    Location:
    Moscow, Russia
    This is my favorite Bowie album.
     
  17. C6H12O6

    C6H12O6 Senior Member

    Location:
    My lab
    Every bit the equal of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust... if not better.
     
  18. lightbulb

    lightbulb Not the Brightest of the Bunch

    Location:
    Smogville CA USA
    My absolute favorite tracks:
    Aladdin Sane
    Panic In Detroit
    The Jean Genie

    Bowie and Ronson rocking on all cylinders.

    I’m astonished and completely flabbergasted that neither Aladdin Sane nor Panic In Detroit were released as singles !!!

    :bigeek: :bigeek: :bigeek: :bigeek: :crazy:
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2018
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  19. Tanx

    Tanx Forum Resident

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    I would have voted for the whole album if not for "The Prettiest Star." I don't hate it, but it's pretty weak.

    My first impression of this album was "Panic in Detroit" blasting out of car radios in the summer of '73. It's still my favorite song off the album. The blues tracks on this record are stellar--RIP Mick Ronson.

    I bought it 10 years after its release--a beautiful first-pressing gatefold from the used record bins. It's definitely one of my most-listened-to records.
     
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  20. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    I like The Prettiest Star. I thought the Stones cover might be the one that stops people given it maximum points.
     
  21. Chrome_Head

    Chrome_Head Planetary Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA.
    Well, it's a marvelous album for the most part, with the caveat that it doesn't hang together as an album as well as Ziggy, IMO.

    "Drive In Saturday", "Panic In Detroit", "Cracked Actor", "Time" and the title track stands up with the best of his work. "Lady Grinning Soul" is a sensual, underrated gem.

    I'd have liked to have seen an original song of some sort in place of "Let's Spend The Night Together". I love Ronson's guitar sound on "Prettiest Star", but it's not one of my favorite songs. "The Jean Genie" I often forget about, but it's a really solid track actually.

    And speaking of Ronson, he's the powerhouse behind this album once again, but it's actually Mike Garson's jazzy piano that gets second billing to Bowie here.

    Ziggy - Aladdin - Pin Ups makes for a rather incredible triptych, all in all.
     
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  22. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2018
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  23. Tanx

    Tanx Forum Resident

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    I might be the only person who finds that cover so ridiculous that I like it. (Just checked the poll--there are 6 of us so far!)
     
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  24. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member Thread Starter

  25. dead of night

    dead of night Senior Member

    Location:
    Northern Va, usa
    Perhaps the best 6 songs in a row on any Bowie album. Bowie can tackle a difficult subject like time and nail it.
     
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