occasional dream, thirteen

First things first:  Is this not the greatest picture you've ever seen?  I love Ronno's fat Windsor knot and what appears to be the icky English food the two of them are eating.  Thank God for the great Mick Rock, who took so many of the memorable Bowie photographs of the Ziggy era... 

Alladin Sane has diminished in my estimation somewhat over the past few years.  It’s the natural cycle of things.  I go hot and cold on most records.  There’s only a small handful that I never get tired of.  One complaint I have about Alladin Sane is that it’s such a poor sounding record, probably because a considerable chunk of it was recorded in the midst of the whirlwind days of Bowie’s 1972 tour of America.  But also, while the record features several fantastic songs, it’s not quite up to the previous two or three releases when taken as a whole.  I guess this slippage is interesting in and of itself in that you can really hear the glitter thing start to run out of gas. The record has an exhausted feel to it, quite different from the sense of a new force in ascendance one gets in listening to Ziggy Stardust.  Don’t get me wrong, though: For just about anybody else, a record of the quality of Alladin Sane would be a career high.  Fair or unfair, the bar is set so much higher for Bowie. I might even venture to say that Alladin Sane is his weakest record of the 70s, though ask me again next week and I might very well tell you it’s one of the greatest records of all time… One of the things I like to think about when I hear Alladin Sane is Bowie’s burgeoning relationship, at the time, with Iggy Pop.  But for the life of me, I see no resemblance whatsoever between Iggy and Che Guevara…