"Not only is this the last show of the tour", David Bowie announced at London's Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973 by way of introduction to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "but it is the last show we will ever do." The recording of that nugget of rock history appears in this box collecting most of Bowie's music from the years of his ascent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Imagine that Five Years (allegedly the first of a series, though Bowie has always announced many more projects than he's released) was all the documentation there was of his musical career—that he'd entered the public sphere with his 1969 single "Space Oddity", retired from the stage after the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour, and vanished to a Tibetan mountaintop following a loving salute to his roots, Pin Ups. He'd certainly be some kind of glam-rock legend, even more than his friend and rival Marc Bolan. He probably wouldn't have the enduring cultural cachet he commands in our world, but there would still be a fervent cult around his three great albums and three iffy-to-good ones, and even more interest in his live recordings and ephemera. To put it differently, Hedwig and the Angry Inch would be the same; LCD Soundsystem wouldn't.
In our world, though, Five Years is only a slice of a much longer curve. The earliest album in the box, 1969's David Bowie—a.k.a. Space Oddity, a.k.a. *Man of Words/Man of Music—*wasn't Bowie's recorded debut, or even his first self-titled album. (In fact, there could theoretically be a Five Years 1964-1968, tracing his evolution from rock 'n' roll wannabe to fussy vaudevillian, although it would mostly be kind of awful.) It was, however, a follow-up to his first successful single, a haunting novelty record about a lost astronaut that had been released a week and a half before the moon landing. The young singer/acoustic guitarist behind these songs obviously has a mountain of charisma, a gift for hooks, and a taste for the language of experimental science fiction, and not the faintest idea what to do with them most of the time. So he wears his influences on his sleeve ("Letter to Hermione" is intensely Tim Buckley-ish; "Memory of a Free Festival" is a hippie rewrite of "Hey Jude"), and constantly overreaches for dramatic effect.
As it turns out, what he really needed was a good hard rock'n'roll band. Bowie assembled a very short-lived group called the Hype with guitarist Mick Ronson and bassist Tony Visconti; by the time they recorded The Man Who Sold the World in April, 1970, they'd picked up drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and gone back to using their singer's name. The Man Who Sold the World is the dark horse of the Bowie catalog. There were no singles issued from it, and the title track didn't really become a standard until Nirvana covered it decades later. But toughening up the arrangements made Bowie's stagey warble vastly more effective, and a lot of his artistic risks paid off: the album's opener is a ferocious eight-minute metal sci-fi opus, "The Width of a Circle", with some of the most overtly homoerotic lyrics a pop musician had ever intoned ("He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/ And showed me the leather belt 'round his hips").
The theme of shifting sexual identity became the core of Bowie's next album, 1971's scattered but splendid Hunky Dory: "Gotta make way for the Homo Superior," he squeals on the gay-bar singalong "Oh! You Pretty Things", simultaneously nodding to Nietzsche and to X-Men. He'd also made huge leaps as a songwriter, and his new songs demonstrated the breadth of his power: the epic Jacques Brel-gone-Dada torch song "Life on Mars?" is immediately followed by "Kooks", an adorable lullaby for his infant son. The band (with Trevor Bolder replacing Visconti on bass) mostly keeps its power in check—"Changes" is effectively Bowie explaining his aesthetic to fans of the Carpenters. Still, they cut loose on the album's most brilliant jewel, "Queen Bitch", a furiously rocking theatrical miniature (Bowie-the-character-actor has rarely chewed the scenery harder) that out-Velvet Undergrounds the Velvet Underground.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars from 1972 was the record that made Bowie the star he'd been acting like for a while, although its reputation isn't quite the same as its reality. It was mostly recorded before Hunky Dory was released; it purports to be a concept album, but doesn't actually have a coherent concept. ("Starman", "Suffragette City" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" were all late additions to its running order.) It is, nonetheless, a fantastic set of songs, overflowing with huge riffs and huger personae. "Five Years" opens the album with Bowie's grandest sci-fi apocalypse yet, Mick Ronson shreds his way to the guitar pantheon, and the band's flamboyant performance of "Starman" on Top of the Pops famously gave the next generation of British pop musicians a bunch of funny tingling sensations. The whole album, in fact, is as erotically charged as an orgone accumulator: Bowie was probably the only person who could have remained sexually ambiguous after declaring "I'm gay, and always have been."
Aladdin Sane, recorded while Bowie and the Spiders were touring their asses off in an attempt to get America to love them the way England already did, is effectively Ziggy Stardust II, a harder-rocking if less original variation on the hit album. There's a paranoid sci-fi scenario ("Panic in Detroit"), a blues-rock stomp ("The Jean Genie"), a bit of cabaret ("Time"), a blunt sex-and-drugs nightmare ("Cracked Actor"). The big difference is that where Ziggy ended with a vision of outreach to the front row ("Give me your hands, 'cause you're wonderful!"), Aladdin is all alienation and self-conscious artifice, parodic gestures of intimacy directed to the theater balcony. Bowie overenunciates his cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" to turn it into a caricature of a disinterested Casanova; his sneering rocker "Watch That Man" is a better evocation of the Stones themselves.
Then there's Pin Ups, a quick-and-sloppy covers album that's more interesting in theory than in practice. The repertoire is the songs he'd heard in London clubs when he'd been starting out as a professional musician (less than a decade earlier), and that had shaped his idea of rock: music by the Yardbirds, the Who, the Pretty Things, and the like. (In other words, not so much his idols as contemporaries who found their audience before he did.) But the original versions of every one of those songs are vastly better, because Bowie doesn't have much to say through any of them, and covers up for it through cruise-ship-entertainer oversinging. His art, in those days, was an art of persona, and songs like "Sorrow" and "See Emily Play" didn't have much to offer it. The band was falling apart, too: the Spiders' drummer Woody Woodmansey had been replaced by Aynsley Dunbar (a veteran of the same London scene), and Ronson and Bolder were gone by the next time Bowie recorded.
Bowie released six studio albums in the '69-'73 period, but Five Years is a 12-disc set. The Ziggy film soundtrack, a document of that allegedly final stage performance that was first released a decade later, appears in its expanded, two-disc 2003 form, complete with a 15-minute "The Width of a Circle" and unnecessary Jacques Brel and Velvet Underground covers (still no sign of the songs on which Jeff Beck played at that gig, though). Live Santa Monica '72, a radio broadcast that was bootlegged for decades and officially issued in 2008, is included here too. Ziggy Stardust itself appears in both its original mix and co-producer Ken Scott's 2003 remix, which is frankly not all that different.
The selling point here for Bowiephiles who probably have all of that stuff already is the two-disc Re:Call 1 (its title cheekily adapts the old RCA Records logo's typeface), a collection of material that only appeared on singles. Some of them are triflingly different mono mixes, but there are a few fascinating oddities: both the never-previously-reissued 1970 dud "Holy Holy" and the much sharper 1971 remake that nearly made it onto Ziggy Stardust, both the frequently-reissued 1972 killer "John, I'm Only Dancing" and the just-as-good 1973 remake that nearly made it onto Aladdin Sane, and a peculiar '71 single (released under the name The Arnold Corns) with larval versions of "Hang On to Yourself" and "Moonage Daydream", both of which were heavily rewritten for Ziggy. Still, Re:Call 1 is far from a complete collection of the officially issued recordings that Bowie made in the 1969-1973 era: there's no "Sweet Head" or "Lightning Frightening" or "Bombers", for instance, and it'd have been nice to include the version of "The Supermen" that he re-recorded in 1971 with the Spiders from Mars' classic lineup.
Five Years doesn't really reconsider or recontextualize Bowie's first classic period—that was more the job of EMI's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane reissues a decade ago, and their 2009 Space Oddity reissue. (The book included with the new set features producers' notes from Tony Visconti and Ken Scott, contemporary reviews of the albums and the final Ziggy show, and reproductions of ads, but nothing especially revelatory.) It's just a collection of some superb records, and some less good ones, from an interesting era of a major artist. If those five years had been all we'd gotten of Bowie, this would be an essential artifact. But they weren't, and the wonders that followed them make the scope of this box seem both over-inclusive and incomplete.
