For my next series of “hour-long intros” I thought I would dive into an artist I was a lot less familiar with, but someone I was curious about and had a large enough body of work to sustain a a really deep dive; so I decided to listen to all of David Bowie’s albums in chronological order and see if I could find the dividing lines and breaking points in there. Along the way I would pick out some of my favorite songs. Most of these will be his bigger or more known hits since I haven’t really had as much time to ingest the deeper cuts, but there could be a few surprises in here.

Before Bowie became the Starman who fell to Earth, he was still the relatively normal human who got trapped in space. Here is hair is still long and blonde and flowing, showing him to be a hippy who was more quietly following trends than making them in the ’60s. His earliest recording during this decade are interesting from a historical perspective as the young David Bowie (nee Jones) was trying to figure out who he was and what he sounded like. Unfortunately nothing from this first album really fits in with the first real phase of his career (or anywhere else) so short of giving these songs their own playlist/blog I have skipped them and gone straight to David’s big break-out, Space Oddity.

While he was at this point very much still in the folky realm with lots of songs about gnomes and goblins and Bob Dylan whilst accompanied by mandolins, it wasn’t until he took off into space that David Bowie came into his own. Granted it was more the recent moon landing and the film 2001 (both directed by Stanley Kubrick) that inspired this particular flight of fancy, but the hook stuck.

From here he crafted a number of solid albums, usually featuring Bowie strumming chummily on a jumbo-sized 12-string guitar. There were a couple of big hits during this period, Space Oddity, Changes, and Life On Mars most notably. The title track from The Man Who Sold The World would become far more famous after Nirvana included it in the Unplugged set than it was at the time.

Major Tom was not a role that David Bowie embodied as much as it was just one character in one of his songs. He hadn’t quite committed himself to his persona as thoroughly as he would in the future, and at this point he still looked and dressed and acted like your typical acoustic singer-songwriter from the early seventies. While his talent had taken him far, there was a good chance he’d be taken for granted if he didn’t come up with a bigger flashier way to present himself.