David Bowie
Live Santa Monica

Bizarrely, David Bowie has been shy about documenting the 1972 Ziggy Stardust Tour that made him the leper messiah for badly adjusted American kids. The Ziggy concert film was barely watchable, and this long-bootlegged fan fave has never been officially released. But it does for Bowie what How the West Was Won did for Led Zeppelin—finally, a ’70s crowd-killer gets a properly epic live album. Bowie soars on the energy of the audience, invading Southern California just in time to dance on the remnants of the hippie dream, shouting, “You’re not alone!” at the lost, scared L.A. children left behind. (He might have been soaring on something else too, judging from improvised poetry like “I asked for lobster tail and they brought me palm tree.”) This was the night Ziggy became the rock star he desperately wanted to be.

Ziggy Stardust was Bowie’s first grand persona, a glitter-rocking star child who fell from outer space to make the world a louder, brighter and decidedly sluttier place. But until this gig, Bowie’s first big U.S. tour was no moonage daydream. He was playing to mostly empty houses (though he killed them in Cleveland, of all places); he’d just performed in New York and gotten dismissive reviews (“songs about Andy Warhol written by an English fairy,” one critic sniffed). In Kansas City, so few fans showed that he reportedly invited them all up front and sat on the edge of the stage until he tumbled off drunk mid-­concert. But October 20—a sold-out Santa Monica Civic Auditorium show broadcast on KMET radio—was the moment America met Bowie and fell in love. You can hear it happen—the star and the crowd get louder and chattier as the show goes on, like a blind date gone horribly right. Halfway through, he starts bantering between songs, a little nervously at first (“You’re terrific”), and the girls start screaming, “David!” A couple of hours before, they probably thought Deep Purple was the shit. Now they’re Those Bowie Girls.

The Spiders From Mars were the loudest, sloppiest band he ever had, with pianist Mike Garson and guitar god Mick Ronson taking “The Width of a Circle” and “Moonage Daydream” to new levels. When the Spiders speed up the already-hyper “Hang On to Yourself,” it sounds just like the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” will five years later. On background vocals, Ronson gets a zero for accuracy yet full marks for gusto—when he and Bowie join voices at the climax of “Five Years,” neither is anywhere near in tune, yet they’re too blissed out to notice. For Major Tom’s rocket launch in “Space Oddity,” Bowie tries to reproduce the engine roar with his voice, a sound that is both deeply silly and bizarrely moving.

Bowie scales his most beatific heights of rock-star egomania for a crowd of flower children who were probably just looking for a place to party. These are the kids Zeppelin wrote “Going to California” about, but Bowie is less coy about his affection for them. He sets out to convince them all they’re as pretty and perfect as the ice-cream-parlor girl in “Five Years,” even if the world keeps spitting on them. It’s strange to remember that most of the crowd is hearing the songs for the first time—he’s giving them non-hits from Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, both flops at this point, plus unreleased songs (“The Jean Genie”) and obscure covers (the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man,” Jacques Brel’s “My Death”). “Space Oddity” is the only intro that gets a “Hey, we know this one” clap. Yet the crowd responds to his bravado, the sex of his songs, the promise that golden years are just beginning.

There was plenty of heartbreak ahead for Bowie and his fans—drugs, despair, the Barbra Streisand version of “Life on Mars?” But at this show, Bowie sounds awestruck, and so do the kids, face-to-face with something commensurate to their capacity for wonder. For once, maybe the first moment in their lives as rock & roll fans, they’re not alone. And for once, maybe for the first moment in his life as a lovesick space cadet, neither is Bowie.

Download “Moonage Daydream,” “Five Years,” “Life on Mars?”