What separates Bowie from all the other glam rockers is that he was at once more glam than the rest and never entirely a part of the scene.

Glitter Trails: David Bowie
By msarko

I've already written extensively on this site about David Bowie, but no conversation about glam rock can really skip him and hope to be relevant. What separates Bowie from all the other glam rockers is that he was at once more glam than the rest and never entirely a part of the scene. This is the story of Bowie's career in general. He's a consummate dabbler with a prodigy's talent, an artist who has mastered so many different styles yet never devoted his entire career to any of them.

Like a lot of the most notable names in glam, David Bowie started as a folkie. For much of the 1960's he sported a mop top and a grim visage, singing songs about being a lonely student, being in love with a poetess and generally romanticizing the innocence of childhood as only an inexperienced kid would. Bowie's folk phase was his least convincing, perhaps because his fascinations have always landed closer to the freaky and the unusual.

So, when Bowie's hobnobbing with bohemians netted him some psychedelic associations, he grew his hair long and made sprawling, Woodstock-ready songs like "Memory of a Free Festival". This was also the period when he aimed for something a bit more theatrical in his first big hit, "Space Oddity". Listening to "Space Oddity" it's easy to hear the lingering elements of folk intermingling with the more lofty, atmospheric flourishes, but ultimately the latter wins out.

It's this theatricality that really makes Bowie in the glam years. And by "glam years" I'm really only talking about 1972 to, at the latest, mid 1974. There were glimmers of glam on Hunky Dory, but the music on that album is already more idiosyncratic and singular than the glitter scene ever managed. "Life on Mars" is pretty much proto-Ziggy-Stardust but it's not exactly glam. It sounds more like Carol King mixed with Syd Barrett's solo work, a simultaneously wild and bizarre mash-up of styles.

All told, David Bowie only put out two real glam albums, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane. Even then, he was showing signs of boredom with the entire genre on the latter. By the time Diamond Dogs hit the shelves, Bowie had already moved on to the soul, funk and arty experimentalism that would characterize the rest of his output in the 70's. After that, it's a long road involving pop, New Wave, soft rock, industrial and whatever you can call the weird stripe of adult contemporary found on Reality.

This is why it's so strange for Bowie to be the figurehead for the glam rock movement. He was already moving beyond it before recording his first glam track and he couldn't even sustain interest in it across two full albums. Sure, the Ziggy Stardust persona is unforgettable and striking, but he's also an outsized parody of the very people who took glam seriously. What happened to Ziggy in fiction literally happened to Marc Bolan, Gary Glitter and countless fellow travelers of the scene. Those who gave themselves over to glam didn't last, professionally and often times personally. Bowie only ever visited the style, neither defining it nor hanging around to let it drag him down.

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