Sometime in the early 1970s, David Bowie woke up and realized he had become a commercial giant. Improbably, songs like “Space Oddity”, which had caught the zeitgeist of the 1969 moon landing, and the theatrical drama of “Life on Mars?” were driving massive pop demand. His Ziggy Stardust tour had started in local pubs and college dining halls and ballooned to include sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, Tokyo’s Shibuya Public Hall, and the Hammersmith Odeon.
But it was really his July 1972 performance of “Starman” on BBC’s Top of the Pops that propelled him to escape velocity. That broadcast was his version of Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show or Michael Jackson’s moonwalk on Motown 25: a single television event that came out of nowhere, arrived fully formed, ambushed the audience, and created an entirely new tribe.
During that eighteen-month tour, Bowie underwent a full transformation from a cult artist singing about laughing gnomes into a global superstar. And then, at the zenith of Ziggy mania on July 3, 1973, during the final show of the tour, he did the unthinkable. Just before the final song, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”, he announced it was not only the end of the tour, but the last show Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars would ever play. Everyone was stunned, including his bandmates. He publicly assassinated the persona that had just made him an icon.
Most artists spend a lifetime trying to trap lightning in a bottle once. If they succeed, they double down on the formula. That was not the way of David Bowie. During that tour, he realized that success creates its own trap. It tempts you to repeat what worked yesterday.
Sometime during that tour, I imagine he woke up with ringing in his ears and heavy realizations weighing on his mind. For one, the world did not want David Robert Jones; it wanted the Ziggy machine. He understood that music was not about the artist bearing his true soul, contrary to the popular narrative manufactured by the music industry for the purpose of selling records. He understood that music was theater.
He also understood, music audiences were fickle. The Ziggy machine had a short shelf life. Feed it too long, and fans will move on. The journey from adoration to pity could be shockingly quick.
And the biggest realization, the Ziggy act only worked on the big stage. It had to be larger than life. In an amphitheater, Ziggy was a rock gawd; back in one of the small pubs where the tour began, he’d be a sad clown. This journey could only be a one-way flight.
By then, powerful people were falling over each other to give him whatever he wanted. He had leverage. He had enough power that he did not need to keep milking the brand that made him famous. As an artist, he possessed the rare fortune of being able to pursue what he found interesting. Abandoning the Ziggy costume meant risking commercial failure. That did not bother him. The work mattered more than the commerce. Ziggy gave him the license to not give a damn.
Bowie’s songs before 1973 were full of castaways, drifters, and outsiders. Major Tom floated in a tin can, watching the earth slip away. Ziggy was the same creature on an epic scale: a meteor burning white-hot with its only possible ending to burn up before landing. I’m sure Bowie knew the ending before he ever slipped on the moon boots, or at least he suspected it. For anyone paying attention, the title of the album was the tell: The Rise AND FALL of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was never meant to last. To keep that suit on for the money would have been an old whore’s trick, cheap and false. Putting a bullet in Ziggy was the only honest finish to the story.
By breaking the mold early in his ascent, he made room to move in any direction he chose. He knew that changing styles later in his career would have been much harder. He had seen what fans did to Bob Dylan when he stood up and traded his acoustic guitar for an amplified Fender Strat. They hated it. They only wanted to hear “The Times They Are a-Changin'”. Bowie saw that trap early. He wanted the right to make whatever music hit him, especially if it sounded nothing like the record before it.
He recognized an uncomfortable truth: when art feels safe, it becomes a prison. Stability breeds instability. We fall in love with what worked yesterday. We confuse the mule that hauled us up the mountain with the mountain itself.
When a tool works, the natural impulse is to keep using it. We stop looking for other tools. Holding on too tight makes the hands stiff. We grip harder. But when all we have is a hammer, what happens when the nails run out?
Bowie understood that if you wait until the world demands you change, you have already lost your leverage. At that point, you are not innovating; you are negotiating terms of surrender. He knew that if you do not kill the thing yourself, time will kill it for you. By offing Ziggy Stardust while the hall was shouting for an encore, he seized the narrative.
People think the opposite of risk is safety. It is not. The opposite of risk is obsolescence. It is death by standing still.
Rather than letting himself become a museum piece under glass, Bowie chose decades of restless movement: cutting straight from Ziggy to Aladdin Sane, the plastic soul of Young Americans, the cold Berlin records, and finally Blackstar, turning his own death into an act of art.
Everyone changes. The only question is: Do you kill the winning formula before it kills you?
