Happy 50th Anniversary to David Bowie’s sixth studio album Aladdin Sane, originally released April 13, 1973. (Note: select sources cite April 19, 1973 and April 20, 1973 as the official release dates.)
Released in 1973, in the enormous shadow of his breakthrough hit The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane was a departure from the space oddity of his previous album. Another chapter in his glam rock era, Aladdin Sane, backs away from the proto-punk scuzziness of Ziggy Stardust, as Bowie dips his toe into jazz and soul influences that would follow him throughout his prolific music career.
Recorded with his Spiders from Mars backing band, and co-produced by frequent collaborator Ken Scott, Bowie wrote much of the album while touring the U.S., a footnote that feels significant for an album described by Bowie as, “my idea of rock and roll America.”
While diving into a more experimental sound, one that would pave the way for his groundbreaking Brian Eno collaborations, Aladdin Sane does not feel unfamiliar to a Bowie fan. Using a similar formula to Ziggy Stardust, the album is simultaneously a continuation in the narrative, and a rejection of a character that had consumed Bowie. Aladdin Sane gives us something that harkens back to Bowie’s early heartthrob days, but with a healthy dose of influence from Americans like New York Dolls and Iggy Pop. Not yet into the coked-out cosplay of his Thin White Duke era, Bowie’s classic guitar hooks paired with obscure lyrics, referencing Carl Jung and Evelyn Waugh, are an unlikely combination and quintessential Bowie.
The first single off Aladdin Sane, “The Jean Genie,” is a gritty rock track and the album’s most commercially successful song. The well-worn, Bo Diddley-inspired riff, cooked up on the American leg of the Ziggy Stardust tour, has an unpolished quality, a feeling akin to Bowie’s contemporaries, the Velvet Underground. Lyrically, “The Jean Genie,” also sounds like a product of someone spending time with Lou Reed. In his 2002 book, Moonage Daydream, Bowie recalls that, “I developed the lyrics to the otherwise wordless pumper and it ultimately turned into a bit of a smorgasbord of imagined Americana.”
Originally offered to, and rejected by Mott the Hoople, “Drive-In Saturday,” was the album’s second single. With its doo-wop backing vocals and moody saxophone, it is a reminder of Bowie’s incredible range, with plenty of his falsetto flourishes. “Time” is another amazing vocal performance, with lots of his signature breathy vibrato. A showcase for his droll, hyper-literate songwriting, the song is a quirky blip on the album, almost a cabaret song, with evocative asides throughout. And though technically a B-side, “Time” eloquently communicates the desperation to abandon the character of Ziggy Stardust, and, more literally, the accompanying American tour, when Bowie cries at the end of the song, “we should be home by now.”
Listen to the Album:
The title track, “Aladdin Sane,” introduces lush piano accents that evolve into an esoteric jazz breakdown, a departure from the more traditional blues pianos on Hunky Dory (1971) and Ziggy Stardust. Performed by Mike Garson, the avant garde solo in the center of “Aladdin Sane,” amongst other jazz inflections, would flourish into an exploration of ambient and electronic music five years later in Low (1977). It’s here that you see Bowie reaching for something different and more experimental, but perhaps lacking the energy or focus to really grasp it at this point in his career.
Throughout Aladdin Sane, Bowie tries on different American costumes—the crooner, the punk, the rockstar. However, the vision is occasionally muddled. In the half-baked Rolling Stones cover “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Bowie gives a campy nod to the group’s influence on the album that perhaps would have been better communicated in a liner note. “Panic in Detroit” is an ode to the White Panthers movement and John Sinclair. It’s raucous and fun, but littered with allusions to a dark, dystopian world. Sonically, it’s a little soft compared to Bowie’s hard rocking past tracks, a place where the loudness of “Suffragette City” would be welcome. These moments hardly diminish the album’s lasting appeal, but can help explain why Aladdin Sane isn’t held in as high of regard as other early Bowie projects.
Aladdin Sane, a pun on the phrase “a lad insane,” is a portrait of a band on the road, inspired yet exhausted. David Bowie is wrestling with fame and its corresponding demons, trying to figure out what sanity looks like and if it’s even worth reaching for. In Aladdin Sane, Bowie creates distance from the towering Ziggy Stardust figure by drawing inspiration from more down-to-earth rock and roll contemporaries of the early 1970s, all while staying true to his otherworldly lyrical styling.
Listen: