David Bowie died twice. Once on a stage in London in 1973, when he murdered his own alter ego in front of three thousand stunned fans. And once in a Manhattan apartment in January 2016, two days after releasing an album about dying that almost no one realized was about dying until he was gone. In between, he was a folk singer, a glam alien, a soul crooner, a Berlin experimentalist, a movie star, a mainstream hitmaker, a Tin Machine frontman, and the first artist in history to sell shares in himself on Wall Street.
No one in popular music reinvented themselves as often or as completely. Bowie’s career was a series of trapdoors: just when the world thought it had him figured out, the floor gave way. The engine of it all was restlessness, and the fuel was an imagination that treated identity the way other musicians treated instruments. Here is the story of how a boy from Brixton became the most shape-shifting star the twentieth century ever produced.
The Eye and the Name
He was born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947, in Brixton, South London. Two things happened to the young Jones that would follow him forever. In 1962, at fifteen, he got into a fight with his friend George Underwood over a girl. Underwood punched him in the eye, and a fingernail scratched the muscle that contracts the pupil. The pupil stayed permanently dilated, giving him the famous mismatched gaze that would become one of the most recognizable faces in popular culture. For the rest of his life, strangers assumed the striking eyes were contact lenses or a birthmark. They were the souvenir of a schoolboy punch thrown over a girl.
The other change was deliberate. By the mid-sixties, Jones was a struggling mod singer fronting a string of bands, and he was being confused with Davy Jones of the Monkees. He needed a new surname. He chose Bowie, after the American frontiersman Jim Bowie and his famous knife. “Bowie” sounded sharp. It cut. It was the last time David Jones would let the world mistake him for anyone else.
Five Days Before the Moon
In the summer of 1969, Bowie was still a near-unknown with a novelty reputation and a folk album nobody bought. Then he recorded “Space Oddity,” a strange, beautiful song about an astronaut named Major Tom who drifts away from mission control and never comes back. His label rushed it out on July 11, 1969, five days before the Apollo 11 launch.
The timing was either genius or pure luck, and it worked: as the world watched Armstrong and Aldrin head for the moon, radio stations could not resist a song about a spaceman. “Space Oddity” became Bowie’s first hit, reaching number five in Britain. Six years later, reissued in the wake of his fame, it went to number one. Major Tom would return throughout Bowie’s career, in “Ashes to Ashes” and beyond, the drifting astronaut as the perfect Bowie metaphor: a man who goes up, looks back at Earth, and decides not to come home.
Killing Ziggy
By 1972, Bowie had invented his masterstroke: Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien rock star, all lightning bolt and platform boots, fronting the album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Ziggy made Bowie a star in Britain. Fans did not just buy the records; they dressed as him. Bowie had created not a persona but a possession.
And then, at the absolute peak of Ziggymania, he killed him. On July 3, 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, before the final encore of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” Bowie stepped to the microphone and said: “Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.” The crowd screamed, thinking he meant the tour. He meant Ziggy. The band did not know. Only Bowie, his manager Tony DeFries, and guitarist Mick Ronson had been told. Ronson later said he nearly broke down on stage. The show was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker and released a decade later as “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”
It was a staggering gamble: destroying the character that had made him famous, live, without warning, in front of the fans who loved it most. But Bowie understood something his imitators never did. The mask was not the point. The point was the freedom to take it off.
The Soul Tour That Nearly Didn’t Happen
Bowie’s next transformation was just as radical. In 1974, deep into his “plastic soul” phase and the “Diamond Dogs” tour, he played two nights at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, recorded for the live album “David Live.” What the audience never knew was how close the shows came to collapse: the local musicians’ union demanded a $70-per-man fee for Bowie’s band to perform, the band refused to play under those terms, and for a terrifying stretch the concert hung in the balance. The shows went on, and “David Live,” released that October, captured Bowie mid-metamorphosis, the glam alien becoming a soul singer in real time.
By 1976, Bowie was in Los Angeles, emaciated, surviving on cocaine and paranoia, convinced witches were stealing his semen and that his swimming pool was being infiltrated. He later said he remembered almost nothing of the “Station to Station” sessions. His escape was radical: he moved to West Berlin, then a divided city on the edge of the Cold War, to get clean.
Three Days from the Wall
In a studio in Kreuzberg called Hansa, nicknamed “the Hall by the Wall” because it stood some five hundred yards from the Berlin Wall, Bowie recorded “Heroes.” The sessions, in July and August 1977, were a gathering of the avant-garde: Bowie, producer Tony Visconti, and Brian Eno, armed with his Oblique Strategies cards. For the searing guitar on the title track, Visconti flew in Robert Fripp of King Crimson, who had not played his guitar in three years. Fripp landed, went straight to the studio, and recorded his parts in three days, mostly without having heard the songs beforehand.
The backing track for “Heroes” was completed before Bowie had written a word. The lyrics came last, inspired by something Bowie had watched from the studio window: Visconti embracing his lover Antonia Maass by the Wall, in full view of the East German guards. Bowie turned a stolen kiss in the shadow of the Cold War into an anthem about ordinary people doing the impossible, if only for one day. “Heroes,” released that October as the centerpiece of the album of the same name, flopped as a single at the time. It is now his most beloved song, played at the 2012 London Olympics and at what felt like every memorial afterward. Some songs take forty years to find their moment.
The Man Who Sold His Future
In 1997, Bowie did something no musician had ever done: he went to Wall Street. Working with banker David Pullman, he securitized the future royalties of his back catalog, 25 albums and 287 songs, into ten-year bonds paying 7.9 percent interest. Prudential Insurance bought the entire $55 million issue. They were called Bowie Bonds, and they were the first celebrity bond issue in history.
The money let Bowie do something he had wanted to do for years: buy out his former manager Tony DeFries, ending one of the most bitter relationships in the business. The bonds were downgraded by Moody’s in 2004 as music piracy ate into royalties, but they were paid off in full when they matured in 2007. Bowie had literally sold shares in his own past to buy his future. When artists from James Brown’s estate to catalog funds followed the same path decades later, they were walking a road Bowie had built.
Let’s Dance and the Price of the Crown
In 1983, Bowie did the most unexpected thing of all: he became a pop star. Teaming with Chic’s Nile Rodgers, he recorded “Let’s Dance,” a sleek, dancefloor-ready album that produced the hits “Modern Love” and “China Girl” and sold millions. The Serious Moonlight tour that followed was the biggest of his career, playing stadiums and arenas around the world to some of the largest crowds he would ever draw. For the first time, Bowie was not ahead of the mainstream; he was the mainstream.
He hated what it did to him. The follow-up, “Tonight,” felt forced, and 1987’s “Never Let Me Down” and its bloated Glass Spider tour were widely seen as his creative nadir. Bowie’s response was characteristically drastic: he formed Tin Machine, a loud, democratic guitar band in which he insisted he was just the singer, not the star. From 1988 to 1992, Tin Machine played small clubs and made two abrasive albums that confused everyone. Critics called it career suicide. Bowie called it rehabilitation. He needed to be in a band again, to be anonymous, to remember what it felt like before the masks. When he emerged in the nineties with the experimental “Outside” and “Earthling,” the spark was back. He had killed another persona, the pop star, to save the artist.
The Final Act
Bowie’s last transformation was his most private. In secret, while the world thought he was retired, he recorded “Blackstar,” an album steeped in jazz and mortality, working with the Donny McCaslin quartet. It was released on his sixty-ninth birthday, January 8, 2016. The videos were full of dying astronauts, blindfolded men, and black stars. Fans debated the symbolism for two days.
On January 10, Bowie died of liver cancer at his home in New York. He had known for eighteen months and told almost no one. The album, it turned out, was a farewell composed in full knowledge, a final trapdoor: the world spent the weekend celebrating a birthday record and woke up to an epitaph. Producer Tony Visconti called it a gift to his fans, a parting masterpiece.
David Bowie spent fifty years proving that identity was a costume and reinvention was an art form. He was Major Tom and Ziggy and the Thin White Duke and a Berlin exile and a pop star and a Wall Street pioneer, and he was none of them, because he was the man underneath, the boy from Brixton with the damaged eye, watching it all happen. The masks made him famous; the man behind them made him immortal, and the music made him eternal. He died as he lived: one step ahead of everyone, already somewhere else.
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