Rodney Bingenheimer: (SiriusXM deejay) In November of 1969 I bought the Bowie album Man of Words, Man of Music on the wall at Lewin Record Paradise on Hollywood Blvd. It was a shop that stocked English imports. I loved the two albums David did for Mercury, later reissued on RCA after his Ziggy Stardust album happened. In 1970 I worked for Mercury and had an office doing FM radio promotion.
At LAX I took Tom Ayres’ Cadillac and picked up David Bowie. The first thing we did was get something to eat at Ollie Hammond’s Steak House on La Cienega.
We drove to Tom Ayres’ house who had been a staff producer for Dot Records, RCA, and Kama Sutra. He was big in rockabilly and helped Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Tom knew and worked with Gene Vincent, who was one of Bowie’s music heroes. Gene came over and they met each other. No photos were taken but they recorded together on a version of Bowie’s “Hang On To Yourself.” I watched them do the song that later was on Ziggy Stardust.
David and I walked to Lewin’s Record Paradise down the street from Mercury. The owner flipped out when David came into the store. Autographs. The whole thing. We went to Al Hernandez’s apartment who was a huge fan of British music and had his early records that Shel Talmy produced. We talked a lot about rock ‘n’ roll. David liked Little Richard, Scott Walker, Lulu, and Cilla Black.
I arranged a press party for Bowie up at attorney Paul Fegan’s house in Hollywood. I had gone to several of his parties.
David received very little radio airplay in the United States but he got exposure from station visits and meeting deejays. I drove David to Orange County. We visited a radio station, KEZY-FM in Santa Ana. I had a box of Man Who Sold The World albums. They were really nice. David spun some records by the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and then I took him to KMET-FM.
At the end of his trip to the United States, David said, “when you come to England, look me up.” He handed me his phone number.
I went to London in the summer of 1971 and David invited me to the Hunky Dory recording sessions at Trident. It was incredible watching him sing the vocals on “Queen Bitch,” “Kooks,” “Andy Warhol” and “Life on Mars.”
In the fall of 1971 and all through 1972 at my E Club, next door to the Chateau Marmont, and later my Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, also on Sunset Blvd. I spun a lot of Bowie. It was David during the Hunky Dory recording that made the first suggestion that I have a club, to play records, acetates, UK imports and demos of English bands in 1971 and ’72.
The night before the October ’72 Santa Monica show, David visited my English Disco club on Sunset, which had a mirrored-in dance floor, and mimed to Elvis Presley records and Roxy Music’s single, “Virginia Plain,” his favorite song.
I’d seen a lot of shows and it was the most amazing concert I had ever seen. Bowie as Ziggy at the Civic, with the light show. From the riveting opening of ‘Ode To Joy’ to the last song. The concept performed and recorded was another step from the Ziggy studio album.
This 1972 Santa Monica Civic Auditorium show totally blew my mind! And all the girls were screaming. Afterwards there was a record company party at deejay Wolfman Jack’s house in the Hollywood Hills.
I do a yearly January birthday tribute to Elvis Presley and David Bowie on my weekly Sunday Rodney on the Rock SiriusXM radio show heard on Little Steven’s Underground Garage channel. I’ll play Elvis’ “Black Star,” and Suzi Quatro’s “All Shook Up.” Then, I’ll program Bowie’s “Cracked Actor,” and the Bauhaus cover of “Ziggy Stardust,” as well as other indie bands doing his tunes: “Kooks” by Rough Church, Lulu’s “Watch That Man,” “With David Bowie,” from Veruca Salt, Susanna Hoff’s “Boys Keep Swinging,” and the Cherry Drops’ “Bowie Medley.”
Andrew Loog Oldham: (Record producer, author) Immediate Records had Humble Pie on tour in '69 and I put Bowie, an acoustic act that week, on the tour. We liked Ken Pitt, his manager. A year later Immediate had collapsed and so had I.
In 1972 I was living in Connecticut and bought and played David's Hunky Dory album. I was in my recluse Don Haggerty Grizzly Adams period; Hunky Dory was a wake-up call. It was time to wake up and get back on the treadmill of life. Hunky Dory was a game changer, the book had changed, the paper, Bowie, was leaner, realer and mean. Years later we shared an elevator in the Brill Building, Bowie blended into the wall. The doors opened, and he departed, letting me know it was him with a wink and a nod
Robert Hilburn (Author, former Los Angeles Times Music Editor) I had fallen in love with the Hunky Dory album and was really looking forward to seeing David for the first time when he played the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on the Ziggy Stardust tour, but I wasn't prepared for the excitement and mystery of that show. The music itself was marvelous, but HE was the attraction. With the orange hair and ultra-confident manner, he seemed so bold that I just thought this guy has no limits. Searching for someone as charismatic, I had to trace my memory all the way back to hearing Elvis for the first time in the 1950s. I ended up interviewing David maybe 10 times over the years and he was always charming, but I never felt I fully understood him, though I was endlessly fascinated by his various guises and moves. Even today, when I think of my 10 favorite concerts, David's Ziggy always makes the list.
David Chatfield: (Music attorney and talent manager). As part of my work as the music critic for the USC Daily Trojan in the early ‘70’s, I recall attending David Bowie’s Santa Monica Civic concert and interviewing him after. I found that, like many other performers, he had an on-stage persona that was left there and off-stage he was a charismatic and highly intelligent musician. A decade later I was asked to give a character reference on David by a friend who was a dancer and who had auditioned for David’s Glass Spider Tour. I related to her my positive impressions of David and, based thereon, she went on the tour and ultimately became engaged to marry him.”
Take a listen to David Bowie: Live Santa Monica ’72. Further audio evidence that Bowie’s stage repertoire songs perspire and inspire without the visual dynamics. The set list is compiled largely from Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust albums and features two covers, Jacques Brel's haunting “My Death” and the Velvet Underground's “Waiting For The Man.” In addition, the disc features a mesmerizing “Space Oddity,” the absorbing The Man Who Sold The World centerpiece “The Width Of A Circle,” (a ten minute joy ride) and an advance preview of “The Jean Genie” that was to surface on his Aladdin Sane album. Released briefly on CD in the mid-‘90s but long since out-of-print, David Bowie: Live Santa Monica ’72 in a 1981 poll, NME music critics proclaimed “(quite simply)... the performer’s, and one of rock’s, best ever bootlegs.”
David Bowie himself is also particularly fond of the concert recording, saying, “I can tell that I’m totally into being Ziggy by this stage of our touring. It’s no longer an act; I am him. This would be around the tenth American show for us and you can hear that we are all pretty high on ourselves. We trainwreck a couple of things, I miss some words and sometimes you wouldn’t know that pianist Mike Garson was onstage with us, but overall I really treasure this bootleg. Mick Ronson is at his blistering best.”
Dr. James Cushing: (Poet and deejay). I saw a Bowie 1972 show in San Francisco. It remains the single greatest rock concert I have ever seen. In terms of the blend of music, image, theatricality and the combination of complete newness and recognizability. Actually, the best thing was Bowie’s relatively low profile of the time. Most of the audience saw him and knew absolutely nothing about him. His music was not on the radio and the first photos had not been widely circulated, except for music periodicals.
What makes hearing and viewing the live broadcast so different right now as the 2008 retail release as an album is somewhat akin to the ‘Hendrix at Monterey’ thing. It’s a star is born moment. You are hearing someone asserting his artistic will. Like a painter on the canvas, which is the crowd.
There was a sense that you’ve seen and heard this beautiful, mysterious extra terrestrial human being morph from face to face. From male to female, from James Dean to Lauren Bacall. The music made enough use of the riffs you remembered from Chuck Berry, Rolling Stones, Free, Who. There was a certain degree of instant familiarity to it but the way these guys looked, moved, and the use of the strobe lights.
So, the songs performed are all a part of a dramatic presentation and you can see the drama by the structure of the songs in the set list. He’s playing a character. ‘Ziggy’ works as a concept album because he becomes the main character within the concept.
Jeff Gold: (Bowie collector, author) Ziggy Stardust was, for me, Bowie’s absolute peak. I discovered him and the Ziggy album via KMET’s live broadcast of his October 1972 concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. As you can hear from the many bootlegs of that show, he and his band, the Spiders, were at their artistic peak at this time, and it still sounds incredible today. I made it my business to find all of his albums, in and out of print, and saw him at the Long Beach Arena and the Hollywood Palladium in March 1973. when he returned to LA. Those shows still rank among the top 5 shows of my life, and I’ve gone to hundreds—maybe thousands-- of shows. I became such an uber fan that the BBC filmed me for their 1974 Bowie Omnibus documentary, If you don’t know Ziggy, go get it NOW!
Jem Aswad: (Senior Music Editor Variety) When I was first hitting double digits in age, I used to sneak downstairs after my parents had gone to bed and watch the late-night rock shows on weekends: In Concert, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, The Midnight Special. I saw so many great acts on those shows but none affected me as much as David Bowie: A TV edit of what became the Ziggy Stardust concert album and film, and the less-great but still exciting 1980 Floor Show.
The Bowie obsession intensified over the following years, and on my first parent-less trip to New York City from our seemingly-galaxies-away small town, my friend and I hit the Village record stores — and my friend bought the Santa Monica '72 bootleg for, I somehow remember, $24.99. I'd run out of money (spending it on a pile of new wave singles) but I borrowed that bootleg so many times that he got annoyed and I finally taped it and later bought a vintage "Trademark of Quality" copy.
Nearly fifty years later, it remains a monumentally exciting document — and irrefutable evidence — of a star who's rising fast and knows it, because he's finally got the goods: Bowie had been trying to become a star for nearly a decade, and the quality of the songs and performance and the pacing of the show — everything from a brief acoustic set to the proto-metal overkill of "The Width of a Circle" — make it so you can almost feel Bowie and the Spiders' inexorable ascent and the electricity of the event. I was still a teenager so I can say without embarrassment that it might have been my favorite album to mime rockstar to — I wanted to be Mick Ronson, not the star but the invaluable wingman, which ironically is the role in which I've most excelled in what I laughingly call my career.
My only complaints, apart from occasional sonic snafus, are the omission of the intro music of Bach's "Ode to Joy" on the official release (maybe just because I associate it so much with what follows) and the fact that they apparently didn't play "White Light White Heat" that night.
Santa Monica '72 remains a holy grail. I've talked with people who were at that show and the Carnegie Hall one that preceded it, who interviewed him on the tour, and I've scoured YouTube for rare clips — there's a blurry and silent but killer collection of snippets from the Memphis show — and I'm hoping the estate will surprise us with something jaw-dropping from the Ziggy tours in the coming months, because several of those shows were professionally recorded (and many were less-professionally recorded).
Live at Leeds, James Brown at the Apollo ('62 and '67), Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, Aretha Live at the Fillmore West, Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club — Santa Monica '72 stands proudly with those classic live albums of the era, even though it was never intended to.
Marina Muhlfriedel: (Screenwriter, Backstage Pass band member) Although the Ziggy Stardust tour began in 1972, I didn’t see a show until May 12, 1973, when David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars played at Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre in London. I was a Bowie-infatuated American student living abroad, and scoring tickets was a dream come true. On the day of the show, my best pal Marilyn and I blasted the Ziggy album over and over as we glammed up, donning our Lurex sweaters, platform shoes, and smudges of glittery Biba eye shadow. Stepping onto the Tube, we ran into dozens of other kids who were similarly decked out for the pilgrimage. We were truly in our element.
As the band launched into the opening bars of “Ziggy Stardust”, for the first time ever, I was moved to rush the stage. I needed to be right up close to the beautiful magic Bowie was spinning into existence. I needed to be deeper inside the music, in that place where each moment is entirely different than the one before. And, I was. Then, alongside Bowie, the perfect counterpoint, Mick Ronson — sheer elegance, shining and playing guitar like a god. The two enticing and repelling one another like fickle musical magnets. The evening flew by in a flash and as the last notes of “Rock and Roll Suicide,” brought it to a close, it took a moment to pull back into a freshly-shifted reality.
While the reviews insisted the sound at Earl’s Court was terrible, I had no idea what they were talking about. For 19-year-old-me, the show was a flawless passage into a world that forever changed what music, art, and performance could be. I remember being awed by the theatricality— how the makeup, costumes, and unique vibe of each song, rolled into a singularity within the music. I loved how Bowie, a radiant, sexually-ambiguous conjurer was at once the actor, narrator, critic, and the story being told. As the experience settled in, I realized there was one particular theatrical element that stayed with me. Before moving to the UK from Los Angeles, I was interested in guerrilla and avant-garde theater and had performed a few times with the Venice Mime Troupe. I had seen Marcel Marceau as a child and loved the illusions he created with movement — the suspension of physical reality. There was something in the way Bowie shifted the weight of his lithe body and made shapes of the space between his hands and arms that, in moments, made him seem like a dancer or, well, a renegade mime.
A week after the show, I learned in the music press about Lindsay Kemp, Bowie’s friend/lover/teacher/choreographer/mime teacher. The story noted that Kemp had a school in Oval, South London. I tracked down the phone number, called, and was told I could try a class. A few days later, I took the train from my college in Richmond to join a colorfully chaotic collection of actors, dancers, and would-be David Bowies posing, climbing invisible ladders, walking in place, and interacting with one another at a measured distance. We were instructed to stay conscious of the negative space between parts of our body —the shapes our hands, legs, torsos, and heads made. Notice how they shifted as we moved. Where our weight settled. Lindsay wasn’t our teacher. I suppose he was too busy sharing the Bowie starlight, so we learned his method from another instructor. During my third class though, the master appeared in all his flamboyant kimono-clad glory to make small adjustments in our postures and whisper in our ears. I felt barely visible to him, but will never forget the experience.
As the years moved on, in every Bowie show I saw— and there were many—I could see Lindsay reverberate through his movements, punctuating each song and accentuating gestures between them. The postures never seemed inauthentic or overly-rehearsed. I think the knowledge and body awareness Lindsay instilled took root and became yet another exquisite part of David Bowie.
Justin Pierce (Former rock journalist) The release of Ziggy Stardust had a profound effect on me, since I immediately recognized David Bowie was a transformative artist, not only immensely talented, but a visionary who had the potential to shake things up. And he certainly did.
Through the years, he became one of music’s most important figures, producing a stunning, remarkable body of work. His concerts were experiences I’ll never forget. From Ziggy at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where his haunting rendition of Jacques Brel’s “My Death” soared, to the Diamond Dogs extravaganza, which I got to enjoy twice at the then, open air Universal Amphitheatre, he never ceased to impress and deliver.
Though I never had the chance to interview him, I did have the opportunity to say hi a couple of times.
One encounter was at the offices of my former colleague Mitch Schneider, Bowie’s PR representative, where I was picking up tickets to a Tin Machine show at the Hollywood Palladium. When I asked Mitch whether the buzz was true that on this tour, David might throw in a couple of classics along with the Tim Machine material, Mitch said, ‘why don’t you ask him’ as David walked in the room. In that OMG moment, David smiled and replied, ‘You’ll just have to see.’ Pure magic.
During my rock journalist days, I also fronted a band Justin Time, where I covered “Suffragette City.” One of my favorite Bowie songs is “Cygnet Committee,” an over 9-minute opus from the Space Oddity album. A powerful track featuring Bowie’s expressive vocals. It’s truly worth going through his entire catalogue. I’m confident, you’ll appreciate and/or discover gems in a new way.
Daniel Weizmann: (Writer, author) In 1972, Santa Monica was beyond sleepy, it was a cow town on the sea. I mean, you had to bus into Hollywood to even go to a Beatles Convention or hit the Sunset Strip to buy Hot Rocks. Then along came David Bowie--a human cyclone ripping up the psychic landscape for all time.
I'm convinced we'll never see another like him, not in pop music anyway. He embodied so many radical contradictions in one artist that he forced you to reconsider pop itself. He was literature but he was street jabber. He did narrative rock opera but he did it fragmented, so that any slice of the story could be a credible top 40 single. Strip away all of it, the costumes, the larger-than-life shtick--and at his core he was just so damn good.
Most of all, he always vibed two intense contradictions in everything he did. On the one hand, he was the ultimate masked performer, the Faker. But on the other hand, while "being the Faker," he was singing about being a lonely cosmopolitan, tripping through the market square, in it but not of it, like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, or TS Eliot's The Wasteland, the alienated 20th century man lost in a nightmare dreamscape called reality.
How lucky were we that David Bowie happened?!”
On September 18, 1975 I interviewed David Bowie in Los Angeles at Television City inside the CBS studios on the corner of Fairfax Ave and Beverly Blvd. Channel 2, like David sang in “Star Man.” Bowie was taping the Cher TV show for a November 9th broadcast and I covered it for the now defunct Melody Maker in their October 25, 1976 issue.
In my brief 1975 Melody Maker interview with Bowie, he commented on the just completed filming of his feature-length The Man Who Fell To Earth movie. Some of the soundtrack was done at Cherokee. It was clearly obvious that David had already departed visually, musically and emotionally from the self-imposed world of Ziggy Stardust character into his current cinematic journey.
“The difference between film acting and stage acting is enormous. On stage you are in total control, whereas in a film the actors are instruments of the director. I think a stage performance is more of a ceremony and one plays the high priest. But in a film you are evoking a spirit within yourself. You feel a tremendous responsibility of having the power to bring something to life. For example, Major Tom in ‘Space Oddity.’”
(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows published in 2014 and Neil Young Heart of Gold during 2015. Kubernik also authored 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon and 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.
Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s book, Docs That Rock, Music That Matters, featuring interviews with D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Albert Maysles, Murray Lerner, Morgan Neville, David Leaf, Dick Clark, Curtis Hanson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
Kubernik’s writings are in several book anthologies, including The Rolling Stone Book Of The Beats and Drinking With Bukowski. Harvey wrote the liner note booklets to the CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.
In 2020, Harvey served as a Consultant on the 2-part documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time directed by Alison Ellwood that debuted on the M-G-M/EPIX cable television channel.
During December 2021, Kubernik was an on-screen interview subject and received a Consultant credit for the rock & roll revival music documentary currently in production about the story of the Toronto Canada 1969 festival featuring the fabled debut of the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band and an appearance by the Doors. Klaus Voorman, Geddy Lee of Rush, Alice Cooper, Shep Gordon, Rodney Bingenheimer, John Brower, and Robby Krieger of the Doors were filmed by director Ron Chapman. Spring release.
