“David Bowie at his rawest, glammest, most rockingest. The time I saw him do Cracked Actor live, he sang it to a skull, a cracked actor indeed. Or was he an alien? Aladdin Sane being the last of Ziggy albums that wasn’t all cover tunes. Either way, it was a harder rock than pretty much anyone was delivering at the time, except maybe Iggy and Stooges … and almost nobody knew they even existed.” (Philip Random)
“As I’ve heard it argued, Aladdin Sane (the album) is song-for-song the best of the Ziggy-era Bowie albums. Yet as a whole, it somehow doesn’t add up the way the previous two do, and thus hasn’t gotten heard as much. Which is great for our purposes as it gives us a bunch of cool non-allergenic gems, like the genuinely insane title track, particularly the part where it goes all free jazz toward the end. Stratospheres over my teenage head when I first heard it. But I listened anyway. It was David f***ing Bowie.” (Philip Random)
“As I remember it, David Bowie hit the suburbs of the Americas in comparatively slow motion. First came Space Oddity (a big deal AM radio hit in early 1973, some three years after it had hit big in the UK), then Ziggy Stardust (various album tracks popping up on FM radio), by which point you were starting to see pictures of the guy. Beyond freakish. Which were backed up by the inevitable rumours (that he actually was an alien, that he and Elton John were secretly married). But by the end of the year, all that stuff was settling, and it was the music you couldn’t ignore. So Much Great And Strange Music. So much so that a track like Panic in Detroit didn’t get near the attention it deserved. If only for the riff. You could base a whole genre on that riff. Which, it’s arguable, the Rolling Stones already had. But that’s another story.” (Philip Random)
The actor (aka David Bowie, David Jones, Ziggy Stardust) is starting to crack here. We all were in retrospect. Even if you were a thickheaded suburban kid barely into puberty – the whole 60s thing just wasn’t playing out as anticipated. Revolution in our time? Maybe. But by 1973, it was clear it wouldn’t be an old-fashioned political revolution. No, it was all going to be much weirder than that.
Randophonic 
