Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

carries his guitar and exposes his calf-high boots as
he props a foot up on a stack of boxes. He is merely
a fragment of Ziggy on this first sleeve. Other people
were pieces of Ziggy as well, whether they knew it or
not. Meeting Iggy Pop, and to a slightly lesser extent
Lou Reed, put him in the mind of fallen rock stars:
larger than life personalities gone down unlit detours.
American singer Vince Taylor, who started as
something of a quasi-Elvis figure with a huge
following in France and ended up a demented,
Jesus-touched, raving lunatic, was someone who
also came to mind. “The guy was not playing with a
full deck at all,” Bowie, who encountered Taylor on
the club scene when he was still a struggling
musician, has said. “He used to carry maps of
Europe around with him and I remember very
distinctly him opening a map out on Charing Cross
Road outside the tube station and putting it on the
pavement, and kneeling down with a magnifying
glass, and I got down there with him, and he was
pointing out all the sites where UFOs were going to
be landing over the next few months.”
Ziggy’s first name is, of course, an alteration of
Iggy. His surname is a tribute to the Legendary
Stardust Cowboy, whose record he was given on his
first U.S. trip in early 1970. From Lubbock, Texas,
Buddy Holly’s hometown, the Legendary Stardust
Cowboy is best known for his twanging sci-fi single “I
Took a Trip on a Gemini Space Ship,” which was
released in ’69 (Bowie covers it on 2002’s
Heathen). The “Ledge” published his own