Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Beetle, plays a mean hand of canasta and will, if you
are not careful, “lay belief on you” and “be your living
end.” With its Spanish acoustic guitar fade-out, it
manages to be hypersexual and objectifying but
never sleazy. It’s in fact as genuinely affectionate a
song about getting regally shagged by a hot black
groupie as you will ever find. The yin to “Brown
Sugar”’s yang?
“Aladdin Sane, that’s me having a go at trying to
redefine Ziggy, and making him what people
wanted,” Bowie would tell the NME years later. “The
Ziggy Stardust album told the whole story. There was
nothing more to say. And I knew when I was making
Aladdin Sane that the bottom had just fallen out of
the whole idea. That was a tough period and I felt for
the first time and the only time like I was working for
somebody else. Tony Defries and his MainMan
organization had seemingly made me a star and I
felt obliged to do something to live up to Tony’s
expectations. Yeah, Aladdin Sane was kind of a
sellout.”
As such, it worked brilliantly. Released that April,
Aladdin Sane was, at the time, the biggest advance
hit in UK chart history, debuting at number one in
April of 1973 and cracking the U.S. Top 20. “The
Jean Genie,” written in New York and recorded in
Nashville and London, was released as the first
single. Shortly before the Winterland tour date, Mick
Rock had shot a video with Marilyn Monroe lookalike
Cyrinda Foxe on the streets of San Francisco.
Bowie does his best James Dean in black leather.