Cocaine, no sleep and deep soul: The story of David Bowie’s Young Americans

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Cocaine, no sleep and deep soul: The story of David Bowie’s Young Americans

By Mark Beaumont

 

David Bowie in concert at Wembley, May 1976 ( Getty/Hulton Archive )

 

It wasn’t just the alien eyes, the golden disc embedded in his forehead or the shock of Martian mullet – the creature known as Ziggy Stardust had a strange pulse too, a vibration in his veins that no earthly drug could have given him.

 

Pianist Mike Garson, drawn from the jazz world to bring jagged avant-garde shapes to 1973’s Aladdin Sane, saw it in him as they travelled together on Ziggy’s farewell tour, gazing out at America through tinted glass with a mixture of awe, infatuation and hunger.

 

Ziggy’s bloodstream, he saw, was sucking in soul.

 

“I remember driving in the limos with him at that period of time and he’d have the headphones on listening to Aretha Franklin,” Garson says today. 

 

Full Story: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/david-bowie-young-americans-album-anniversary-bruce-springsteen-ziggy-stardust-a9330526.html