#ziggy stardust tour

[the-memphista]

David Bowie photographed by Mick Rock (1972-1973, Ziggy Stardust tour) (x)

[musical-suicide]

[jdms-flat-ass]

David Bowie Moonage Daydream (2022) — Trailer

[uncharmed-eros]

'Lo, I'm Eros!

Quick preliminary get to know me:

I'm an English and Journalism major, minoring in French

I also speak Japanese

I studied abroad for a semester with my sister at Sophia University (上司大学) in Japan

Going to be posting soon about the upcoming trip!

In the meantime I'm trying to be more active and post my current activities

Okay now the fun stuff:

My faves:

Books: Reverie by Ryan La Sala, Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Drinks: ANY tea, Hot Chocolate, Monster Energy (the white one), occasional coffee

Artists: Franz Liszt, Bowie, Taylor Swift, Cavetown, Paul Cézanne

(Future) Pet: Siberian Cat

Flower: Hydrangeas (esp. the Japanese word for it- 紫陽花)

TV: ATLA, Octonauts, Tangled, PJOTV

Activities: Sketching in colored pencil, Baking (mostly tea scones and cookies), Playing piano, Reading

Taylor Swift Album/ Era: Folklore <3

Color: Dark Blue (not necessarily navy)

That's all that I can think of to introduce about myself, ciao~

[earlycuntsets]

"DEATH COMES RIPPING" - SPOOKY ISSUE

'THE BLACK PARADE, THE TRIUMPHANT NEW ALBUM BY MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE MAY HAVE A TRAGIC STORYLINE, BUT IT'S NOTHING COMPARED WITH WHAT THE BANDMATES ENDURED TO BRING THE DISC TO LIGHT

PHOTOS BY JON WIEDERHORN PHOTOS BY JUSTIN BORUCKI

STANDING ON A BALCONY nine floors above the teeming streets of New York, Gerard Way overlooks the city in which My Chemical Romance began assembling their ambitious new album, The Black Parade. The newly peroxide- blond frontman takes a deep drag from a cigarette and exhales with a sigh. He knows he shouldn't smoke, but it's his only remaining vice.

"If I hadn't been sober, I think The Black Parade surely would have killed me," says Gerard, who climbed on the wagon in 2004. "We were going insane the whole time, and I had to cling to my sobriety to stay even a little lucid. The album became like this beast that was consuming us."

Following up a release as successful as 2004's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, which sold 1.4 million copies in the U.S. alone, is never an easy task. And the various scares the band experienced as they worked on the new record-drummer Bob Bryar had a near-fatal staph infection, Gerard seriously injured his foot, and some restless spirits at the studio where they recorded kept them all on edge-did not help matters. And neither

did MCR's decision to make The Black Parade (Reprise) a concept disc. Together, Gerard and his bandmates-Bryar, guitarists Frank lero and Ray Toro, and bassist Mikey Way (Gerard's younger brother)-decided to craft a record about a dying young man who is visited by a cast of strange characters that help him examine his short life.

But diving into the conceptual deep end proved well worth the hassle. The Black Parade is not only MCR's most realized offering; it's also one of the most eclectic, enjoyable rock records of the year. One listen to tracks

like "House of Wolves," "The Sharpest Lives," and "Dead!" makes it clear that My Chemical Romance can still rip a good metallic punk tune. But the bandmates are now equally influenced by epic albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall, David Bowie's The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and Queen's A Night at the Opera.

"A lot of bands from the scene we came from try to strip down their music to 'keep it real," Gerard notes. "But the real you is what you've always had inside you and what you strive to be. So when we started compiling the material we had written, we were like, You know what? This has to be a huge, theatrical record."

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE started working on ideas for The Black Parade in the back of the bus while on 2005's Warped Tour, after which they flew to New York and rented a rehearsal space for two months. And that's when things started to get weird.

"I was living in Queens, and I had to commute on the subway every day," Gerard says. "I was suddenly very scared and paranoid. I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when you're trying to work on a record. And I had no anonymity because there were a lot of teenagers on the train." In reaction to the young fans he encountered on the underground,

Gerard wrote "Teenagers," a T. Rex-style romp with the chorus line, "Teenagers scare the living shit out of me." "The song came directly from commuting when school let out and being so terrified of them," the singer says. "I was like, Wait a minute. These are the same people that listen to our band. Why am I scared? And I realized it was because they're scared, too. Teenagers are made to feel like they can only solve their problems with violence. They lash out at each other in a really volatile way." After several months experiencing the joys of mass transit, MCR had completed only a handful of songs and felt like a change of scenery (and climate) might do them some good. "I couldn't keep working in New York," says Gerard. "We wanted isolation."

id: Gerard leads the way to what will likely be the band's second platinum record

So the group relocated to Paramour Mansion, outside of L.A. Nestled high in the hills, the deluxe estate overlooks the trendy Silver Lake area and boasts spacious rooms, a gorgeous pool, lush gardens, a state-of-the-art recording facility-and a few special guests.

"The place is definitely haunted," Gerard says. "Doors would slam, and the faucets would turn on. You'd get a bath drawn for you of freezing-cold water in your room, and you wouldn't know why." As unnerving as its mischievous spirits could be, the Paramour was also inspiring, and contributed to the haunting vibe of songs like "The End" and "This Is How I Disappear." More important, it led Gerard to come up with the bleak, surreal concept for the record. "I would have these night terrors, where it would feel like someone was choking me, and my heart would stop and I would stop breathing," he says. "I would wake up in the middle of the night and write these notes to myself, and one of them read, 'We are all just a black parade.' So I started thinking about how this band is kind of a black parade, like a funeral-procession rock thing. And I used that idea to piece together this story about the idea that when you die, death comes for you however you want." Gerard molded his concept into a narrative about a character he dubbed the Patient, whose strongest memory from childhood is of his father taking him to the city to see a parade. Two songs into the album, he dies, and the black parade comes for him.

"During the rest of the story, he meets this entity of death and all these characters, like Mama, who represents anyone who's ever lost their son in a war," Gerard explains. "It's almost like these Canterbury Tales, where he goes along on this journey, and at the end he decides whether he wants to live or die." With the concept in place, My Chem made the songs as sweeping and theatrical as Gerard's lyrics. They accomplished this, in part, by combing through their own eclectic record collections and pulling choice elements that would set them even further apart from other melodic punk bands.

The first two minutes of "Welcome to the Black Parade" stemmed from Gerard's love for Broadway musicals, the horns in "Dead!" came from Mikey's interest in Blur and Britpop, and the jaunty feel of "Mama" was informed by Tom Waits and Nick Cave. But the most poignant moment on the record, "Cancer," was (unlike its morbid moniker) something of a pleasant surprise. "I was very upset about something in my personal life, and that's when that song came out," Gerard says. "It was really spontaneous, and it was recorded pretty much live with Rob [Cavallo, the record's producer] on the piano and me in the vocal booth. Then we added layers of drums, which gave it a certain urgency. It's the song I'm most proud of because it was the most pure emotion we've ever captured, and it gets such an immediate response. You can't shake what the song is about."

As the CD approached completion, some members of the band began to show signs of nervous exhaustion. The group was scheduled to fly to England to play the Reading Festival, and as the date grew near, Toro, who has a fear of flying, got noticeably agitated. Then, after the band tracked "Welcome to the Black Parade," which was originally called "The Five of Us Are Dying," the guitarist lost it.

"I thought I had this premonition," Toro explains. "I was flipping through the TV channels, and on the news. there would be something about a plane crash, and every time I woke up in the morning, the clock would say 9:11. I was playing Tomb Raider the night before the flight, and on the level I ended up at, there was this whole flashback to a plane crash. So right before the flight I was like, 'That's it. I'm not flying."

Despite his misgivings, Toro boarded the plane, and when My Chemical Romance returned to L.A. (all of them still very much alive, thank you very much), The Black Parade was completed without further incident. Listening back to the record, the band members were in awe of what they had achieved and eager to share it with their fans. "There was a real confidence that came to us," Gerard explains. "Having survived it, we felt like we were changed forever. I feel different as a performer now, and I think we really finally discovered who we were as a band." But just because MCR were done with the record didn't mean that it was done with them. About a month later, the band was shooting a video for "Famous Last Words" with director Samuel Bayer (Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins) on a set featuring walls of flame, when-seized by the moment-lero grabbed Gerard's throat from behind and wrestled him to the ground. The singer rolled one way; his foot went the other. "It bent completely backwards, and I heard a crack and felt this agonizing pain," Gerard recalls. "I tore all the ligaments in my foot, but I got up and continued to perform." "I didn't know what I was doing," says lero, shaking his head. "I wasn't trying to hurt him. I felt awful. I still do." Gerard's injury was serious, and he still walks with a cane, but it paled in comparison to what happened to Bryar. At the end of the shoot, the pyro was so intense, the drummer could feel his leg burning, but he stuck it out for the rest of the song. By then, he had a nasty third-degree burn. And the misfortune didn't stop there. Bryar didn't take his antibiotics regularly, and he failed to keep the wound clean. By the time the band got back from a brief tour of Japan, the burn was severely infected. Then Bryar's face swelled up and, after doing the MTV Video Music Awards preshow telecast and a special club show, stumbled into a hospital emergency room in intense pain. "I thought I'd be there for 10 minutes, but as soon as they saw me, they got all serious and gave me an IV and said they had to do a CAT scan," recalls Bryar."They did all these blood tests and kept me there for 14 hours." Doctors discovered that Bryar's leg infection had spread to his blood and caused an abscess in his face that was creeping dangerously close to his brain. If it had been left untreated for another two days, he could have died. "The whole thing was such a nightmare," Bryar says. "This doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube. Then he went in and out of the inside of my mouth with the needle about 10 times. Fortunately, the treatment worked, and Bryar left the hospital three days later. With tragedy averted, My Chem are now focusing on touring for The Black Parade. They'll be in Europe for most of November, and when they get back at the end of year, they'll start rehearsing for a U.S. arena tour that starts in February. "We want to put on a full show with props and staging like The Wall," Gerard says. And MCR plan to keep the Patient alive long after they're done touring for the CD. "I would love to see the story turned into a play or a musical, and it could easily be a movie," enthuses Gerard. "Making this record, we cut ourselves open every day, pulled out every organ, and lay them on a table so it would be something we're completely happy with. We want The Black Parade to exist for a long time." "The whole hole thing nightmare. This doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube." -BOB BRYAR

"I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when you're trying work on a record."

-GERARD WAY

12/2006 revolver - mcrhollywood on flickr

[transit-fag]

Okay @ziggy-stardust-is-in-love I cleaned up so here have a Room tour

Photo of most of the room

Bookcase against the other wall

Desk area

Bed Area

Now to meet some faces

Penguins and Otters

Sloth

Ray and Bat

And some handmade Musical Posters

[i-am-but-a-holyman]

finally making an intro

song i'm normal about this week - baby blackout ~ daisy grenade

I MADE A KILLJOY RP BLOG -> @1uckycharmx GO RP WITH ME (still very bare but i am working on it) EDIT : I LOST THE PASSWORD TO THE KILLJOY RP BLOG

THESE ARE MADE BY @horseshoemybeloved AND I LOVE THEM

(cut necessary because i am the yappiest of yappers)

no i couldn't resist putting the blinkies i'm sorry

❤️ FOB, MCR, old P!ATD, PTV, KoRn, Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Daisy Grenade, IDKHow, NIN, Linkin Park, Lil Witchy, Cobra Starship, Green Day, Muse, Millionaires, Limp Bizkit, The Cure

❤️ Saw FOB 7/19/23 and 3/30/24, Saviors Tour 9/2/24 :)

🦇 world's meanest Dungeon Master

❤️ Borderline worrisome love of Rocky Horror & Lost Boys + seen nearly every Tim Burton movie too many times

🩵 also into Breakfast Club, Stand By Me, The Outsiders, BTTF1-3, insert stereotypical 80s movie here

🖤 AND NOW I WATCH ANIME APPARENTLY i fucking love deathnote and alien stage and i was really into black butler for a while there

❤️ not the first or the last, but possibly the prettiest.

🪶it can't rain all the time🪶

⚡️ my Crow and Lost Boys graphics above and below were made by the amazing @irldenji :)

💣 and my heart hand grenade was made by @ziggy-stardust-is-in-love :)

ANDDD my oct 19 prophecy was made by @youmustfixyourheartt

🌪🩷 proud friend of dorothy

❤️ Genderfluid, any/all pronouns :) but no matter what the gender is this will always be my girlblog

❤️ Finally overcoming my shame to reveal I'm on ao3, practically trapped in a timeloop with how I'm writing the same three plots over and over and

🖤 and i have a fanfiction sideblog @magic8tally

❤️ mcr5 is real

💗RECOMMEND ME SC3N3 MUSIC PLZ, I NEED MORE BANDS TO LISTEN TO

🎸 stranger things (steddie & jopper & byler)

🍑someone stole all my fruit🍑

❤️ killjoy name - lucky charm

❤️ dip n pip LOVER

if you read all that i'm throwing a cookie at you 🩷

[ryan-sometimes]

what pieces of media do you most wish you could experience again for the first time?

The movie Jennifer’s Body

Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars by David Bowie. The whole album

Spellbound by Siouxsie and the Banshees

All of Disintegration by The Cure

Season 1 of Killing Eve

Lady Gaga’s 2009 VMAs performance of Paparazzi

Madonna performing Express Yourself at the Blond Ambition tour

[smileup222]

Random thought:

Season 3, Lestat adopts the stage persona vampire Lestat, as in the sense of Ziggy Stardust by Bowie.

Lestat acts just like himself without people suspecting anything cuz it’s seen as a stage persona. The best cover for a real vampire.

Then Lestat releases an album, does a tour and got a TV show / movie deal called Interview With The Vampire.

[rockandrollpicsandthings]

Mick Ronson, Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars tour, 1972

[slackville-records]

David Bowie - Starman (Official Video)

A new video for David Bowie's iconic 1972 hit Starman has been released to mark the arrival of a new edition of Bowie's album of the same year, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

The video was compiled using previously unseen film shot by Bowie's longtime collaborator Mick Rock, and was shot in the UK on the Ziggy Stardust tour in 1972 and 1973.

[eternal--returned]

CYRINDA FOXE: David Bowie and his wife Angela had a very open marriage. They were sleeping with anybody they felt like sleeping with. David and Angela and I had a ménage à trois for about five minutes, but then I made her leave because David and I were gonna play. Angela was fucking David's black bodyguard, and David and I used to get down on all fours and peek in their keyhole and watch them fuck. I was sort of like a new toy for David on the Ziggy Stardust tour. But while we were in San Francisco, David asked me, "Are you in love with me?" I said, "No." I wasn't about to say, "Yes!" I was still tripping around. I had no flies on me then. No salt on my tail. I didn't want to get tied down. Besides, Tony DeFries wanted everybody to be this Bowie thing. I didn't want to cut my hair like that. So I wasn't impressed with them. I mean, okay, I get to go on a place and go somewhere, but that's all I thought it was. So when David Bowie asked if I was in love with him, I told him no, he left me there.

Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain ֍ Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996)

Cyrinda Foxe

[lalaballa]

Notes on The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip:

What if Lizzy and Genie refer to Thin Lizzy and Bowie's Jean Genie?

You and Lizzy in the summertime // Wrappin' my tiny mind round a lullaby

Tlsp, NME interview 19/1/08

Plus: Alex in 2018 debunked the Lana del Ray association: In an interview with Beats 1 at the Osheaga festival on 4th August, Alex Turner debunked this rumour stating, “No, its not [a reference to Lana del Ray]… it’s an objective correlative.” (Genius)

And... sweet info: "The Boys Are Back In Town" was the first song played post gig during The Car tour 🥹

You and Genie wearing Stetson hats // Tryna gain access to my lily pad...

I'm just a bad girl tryna be good // I've got a laser guidin' my love that I cannot adjust

Verse 1 and Chorus of Jean Genie, from Bowie's Aladdin Sane:

Genius notes are very interesting: "Apart from just the part of a chimney that sticks out above a roof? Possibly he’s talking about dicks. We already know that the Jean Genie spends a lot of time “on his back,” and “chimney stacks” are pretty phallic as images go. Plus, the name “Jean Genie” has been associated with the (gay, male) French existentialist Jean Genet. So the lyrics might be suggesting here that Jean Genie likes the D. Or it could be a nonsense phrase. It definitely wouldn’t be the first or last time Bowie stuffed his songs full of nonsense phrases."

Alex and Miles LOVE Aladdin Sane:

1. The singer also revealed why he’s had enough of David Bowie’s track ‘Time’. “I’ve been trying to fix a humming in my home stereo – it’s in the right speaker,” he said. “David Bowie’s album ‘Aladdin Sane’ has been sitting on the turntable so I’ve been playing ‘Time’ – the first song on the second side – whenever I’ve tried to solve the problem. I must have heard that song thousands of times this week… I’ll never be able to listen to it again.” NME, 19/3/13

2. AT: I love the whole Ziggy Stardust period, with “Hang on to yourself”, “Five Years” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”. But it’s true that “Aladdin Sane” is incredible, it’s got “Drive-in Saturday” and, above all, the grandiose “Lady Grinning Soul”. X

So, what if Lizzy and Jeanie invoke a certain mood or memory in the narrator's life? Who/What are they?

* ps. regarding milex references in WFEMTFF, "in the mood for love" is for miles and I will die on this hill !!

[leoofitzz]

I got bored and decided to make an overview of David Bowies' characters, the songs they're in, and fun facts (might update?)

Major Tom

Space Oddity

Ashes to Ashes

Hello Spaceboy

Blackstar

Love you till Tuesday

Described as a junkie and alcoholic, likely based on David himself

Ziggy Stardust

Five Years

Soul Love

Moonage Daydream

Starman

It Ain't Easy

Lady Stardust

Star

Hang On to Yourself

Ziggy Stardust

Suffragette City

Rock 'n' Roll Suicide

Androgynous alien

Aladdin Sane

Watch That Man

Aladdin Sane

Drive-In Saturday

Panic in Detroit

Cracked Actor

Time

The Prettiest Star

Let's Spend The Night Together

The Jean Genie

Lady Grinning Soul

Often mistaken for his predecessor, Ziggy Stardust, based on the idea of Ziggy going to America

Halloween Jack

Future Legend

Diamond Dogs

Sweet Thing

Candidate

Sweet Thing (Reprise)

Rebel Rebel

Rock'n'Roll with me

We are the dead

1985

Big brother

Chant of the ever circling skeletal family

Described as a real cool cat, relatively short-lived as David started transitioning into the soul man in the Diamond Dogs tour

The soul man

[Soul part of Diamond Dogs tour only]

Appeared at the height of Bowies coke intake, a sort of transition into The Thin White Duke

The thin white duke

Station to Station

Golden Years

TVC 15

Stay

Wind is the wind

David at the height of his drug use, controversial period

The DJ

D.J.

DJ could stand for David Jones, Davids given name

Pierrot

Ashes to Ashes

Threepenny Pierrot

On the cover of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), rarely seen character [I love you Pierrot💔]

Screaming Lord Byron (left)

Jazzin' for blue jean (short film)

Blue Jean

Vic (right)

Jazzin' for blue jean (short film)

Vic is a hopeless romantic who was at Screaming Lord Byron's concert with a girl, Screaming Lord Byron ends up leaving the concert with her as they already knew each other from Peru

The blind prophet

Lazarus

Blackstar

Davids last character, likely blind as a symbol of David being blinded by fear of his inevitable death

[alienelvisobsession]

The David Bowie Connection

David Jones’s very first performance was not as David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, or the Thin White Duke, but as an Elvis impersonator in front of a crowd of Boy Scouts in Bromley. The year was 1958, David was 11 years old, and among the songs that he sang for his audience there was probably “Hound Dog”, which his cousin Kristina remembers as one of the records he owned, and to which they danced to “like possessed elves”. It’s important to remember that it was difficult to get American records back then in England, but through his work as a promoter, David’s father managed to bring home a collection of American 45s, which included Little Richard, Fats Domino and, obviously, Elvis. Rock ‘n roll was like a ray of sunshine in David’s grey postwar world, still plagued with food rations and the rubble of bomb sites.

In high school, David liked jamming with his guitar, like Elvis did, and he was also interested in fashion and science fiction like him. Rock ‘n roll was elusive in England, but there were cafés with a jukebox where you could hear it as if it were some secret information. David liked oddities and stagecraft, like Elvis’ gyrations and extravagant clothes. He also loved Little Richard, whom he thought would die on stage because of the energy he put during his concerts. He would later say: “Elvis had the choreography, he had a way of looking at the world that was totally original, totally naïve, and totally available as a blueprint. Who wouldn’t want to copy Elvis? Elvis had it all. It wasn’t just the music that was interesting, it was everything else. And he had a lot of everything else.”

After a few unsuccessful albums, David Jones – now using the name David Bowie, like the knife – started experimenting with what the press called “glam rock”, that a lot of people thought was decadent and deviant. In 1972, when questioned about young boys with glitter makeup attending concerts, he said: “What about Elvis Presley? If his image wasn’t bisexual then I don’t know what is. People talk about fag rock, but that’s an unwieldy term at the best of times.” You could say that Bowie, like Elvis, obliterated boundaries in music, as much as in fashion, changing forever what was permitted and accepted as a stage artist, playing with clothes, makeup and sexuality in new ways.

Bowie’s fascination with Elvis was so big that in June 1972 he attended his concert at Madison Square Garden. “I came over for a long weekend,” Bowie recalled many years later. “I remember coming straight from the airport and walking into Madison Square Garden very late. I was wearing all my clobber from the Ziggy period and I had great seats near the front. The whole place just turned to look at me and I felt like a right cunt. I had brilliant red hair, some huge padded space suit and those red boots with big black soles. I wished I’d gone for something quiet, because I must have registered with him. He was well into his set.”

That was the concert that triggered the famous New York Times headline “Like a Prince from Another Planet”. It’s serendipitous that Bowie’s influential album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, where he plays an androgynous alien rock star, came out that same month. The alter ego and stage persona of Ziggy Stardust, which he used in 1972-73, had started to form the year before, during an American tour. Like everything in his music and stagecraft, Bowie was inspired by many things, from Iggy Pop to experimental theater. Ziggy Stardust was loosely inspired by Vince Taylor, a 1950s rock ‘n roller who Bowie witnessed going off his rocker and obsessing over aliens, but it’s also reminiscent of Elvis (whose fall from grace had already started, according to many, and whose mythology includes being an alien). Unlike other early Elvis fans, though, Bowie loved Elvis’ 1970s jumpsuits and explicitly told his costume designer Freddie Burretti to draw inspiration from them for his stage costumes. As a result, Ziggy’s costumes are as outrageous as Elvis’, but in a different way.

To double down on his rock n’ roll opera, “Rock ‘n Roll Suicide”, the melodramatic song with which Ziggy closed his concerts, is essentially about a washed-up rockstar. Ziggy literally sang it in an Elvis-style jumpsuit, and a solemn voice announced at the end of the concert: “Mr. Bowie has left the building”. Ziggy is an archetypal messiah rockstar who arrives on earth from Mars, becomes a prophet of rock ‘n roll, and then literally destroys himself. You can argue that Ziggy Stardust was a departure from hippies: a postmodern interpretation of a rockstar, and a meditation on superstar status.

The following album, “Aladdin Sane”, where Bowie continues the story of Ziggy Stardust, features the rockstar with a lightning bolt drawn across his face, which many say is a reference to Elvis’ TCB logo.

Elvis and Bowie, who share the same birthday, are very different artists, but if Elvis was the sacrificial lamb of rock ‘n roll, Bowie had his example to become a master in brand renewal, and studied deaths and rebirths. After killing his Ziggy Stardust alter ego, Bowie had other inspirations and continued to create extravagant personas to use on stage and off stage, not without controversies.

Bowie’s connection with Elvis went further than just liking his early hits: he had an awareness of his own fallibility that made him empathize with Elvis on a more profound level. Of his disastrous 1978 movie “Just a Gigolo”, for example, he said that it was “thirty-two Elvis movies rolled into one.” He was still very much fascinated with him in 1975-76, to such a degree that he pitched his song “Golden Years”, which incorporates elements of 1950s doo-wop into a funk tune, to him. Although it’s unclear if Elvis ever heard the song, Bowie’s office did contact Colonel Parker for a possible collaboration, maybe as a producer for one of Elvis’ albums.

Even Bowie’s last song, “Black Star”, references Elvis. Written at a time when Bowie knew he was dying, the song has the same title as an an alternative version of the title track for his 1960 western movie “Flaming Star”. It’s a song about death, as in the movie Pacer knows his time has come and Elvis sings: “Every man has a black star / A black star over his shoulder / And when a man sees his black star / He knows his time, his time has come”. It seems to me that Bowie intended to close a circle with this reference: since they were born on the same day, it seemed only natural to reference Elvis’ fictional death in one of his movies. Only, in one of his most clever postmodern games, Bowie’s death wasn’t fictional after all.

Here is David Bowie imitating Elvis’ voice for a Christmas message on BBC radio 6 Music in 2013:

August 16, 2002 marked the 25th anniversary of Elvis’ death and Bowie opened the concert with “I Feel So Bad” and “One Night”, and told the story of what he was doing when Elvis died:

Here is a link with my other connection posts. I have written about many artists who were inspired by Elvis, from Jimi Hendrix to Quentin Tarantino. If you have any suggestions about artists who have an Elvis connection worth exploring let me know, and I’ll do some research for my next post.

[andtosaturn]

2024 in gifs ♡

post your favorite and most popular post from each month this year (it’s okay to skip months) (i am including graphics too lol)

thank you @katebeckets for tagging me! ♡

JANUARY —

favourite: the ballad of songbirds and snakes + suburban legends gifset (297)

most popular: the rocky horror picture show pink + blue gifset (571)

FEBRUARY —

favourite + most popular: heathers + miss americana and the heartbreak prince gifset (275)

MARCH —

favourite: the rocky horror picture show eras tour poster (107)

most popular: chappell roan tiny desk concert gifset (206)

APRIL —

favourite: orla gartland 'kiss your face forever' graphic (57)

most popular: bella goth's disappearance set (246)

MAY —

favourite: dirty dancing + but daddy i love him gifset (227)

most popular: stevie nicks + taylor swift gifset (574)

JUNE —

favourite: maisie peters 'the good witch' anniversary graphic (160)

most popular: hot to go graphic (2,618)

JULY —

favourite: lorde + summer gifset (185)

most popular: doctor who 'the unicorn and the wasp' gifset (453)

AUGUST —

favourite: nick miller 'tomatoes' gifset (430)

most popular: brendan fraser gifset (584)

SEPTEMBER —

favourite + most popular: the rocky horror picture show + pink pony club gifset (783)

OCTOBER —

favourite: bruce springsteen 'my hometown' lyrics (36)

most popular: stevie nicks 'the other side of the mirror' graphic (240)

NOVEMBER —

favourite + most popular: ziggy stardust graphics (432)

DECEMBER —

none yet lol

no pressure tags: @cellphonehippie ♡ @stood-onthecliffside ♡ @tolerateit ♡ @mikelogan ♡ @nessa007 ♡ @uhhrellys ♡ @jakeperalta