Product Description

It's no surprise that ALADDIN SANE and PIN UPS came out in the same year. Each drip with the seedy sexuality of London's late '60s sexual revolution. Yet, while PIN UPS was a mid-'60s sampling of influences--a glorified cover album--ALADDIN SANE was all Bowie.
Stepping out of the Ziggy Stardust shadow (Bowie would announce his temporary retirement from the stage later that year), ALADDIN SANE was the aftermath ofZiggy's visit, a brutal memoir of the drugs, sex and glamour that a young starlet could find at the time. "Forget that I'm 50/'Cause you just got paid", Bowie croons, adopting thepersona of a "Cracked Actor", and one wonders how far stardom had pushed Bowie. Was he indeed a lad insane?
The macho guitar rave-ups are a brilliant spewing of the PIN UPS influences. Mick Ronson's searing guitar is beautiful trash, made of Stonesy grind and dangerous Kinks-like riffing. Bowie is at an evocative peak, his vocals at once voyeuristic and enticing. His cover of "Let's Spend The Night Together" sends an unwashed shiver up the back, and his youthful exuberance on "Panic In Detroit" is charmingly believable.
ALADDINSANE showed that Bowie was an artist with staying power that reached beyond his previous Martian Cult status.

Track Listing

1. Watch That Man
2. Aladdin Sane
3. Drive In Saturday
4. Panic In Detroit
5. Cracked Actor
6. Time
7. Prettiest Star
8. Let's Spend The Night Together
9. Jean Genie
10. Lady Grinning Soul

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1600 in Music
• Released on: 1999-09-06
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
The second most important moment in Bowie's glam period, Aladdin Sane is full of smart, cutting-edge songs that hold up decades later as classic moments in rock. Standout tracks include "Panic in Detroit", with Mick Ronson's screaming guitars and Mick Woodmansey's urgent drumming; "Watch that Man", a piano-driven, rollicking number perfect for the Bowie strut; the lascivious and sweaty "Cracked Actor"; the punky "Jean Genie"; and a perfectly raucous cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together". "Time" hearkens back to the theatrics of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, while "Drive in Saturday", "The Prettiest Star", and "Lady Grinning Soul" serve as precursors to Bowie's "plastic soul" sounds that came later in the 1970s. Aladdin Sane is even more impressive when considering that the same year this album was made, Bowie was also working with artists like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, producing some of their most heralded works (the Stooges' Raw Power and Reed's Transformer). --Lorry Fleming

Customer Reviews

Watch that man
The big album of 1973, Bowie (or at least his Mainman production team) was coining it in. No surprise; he embraced the guitar driven rock of the glam era and lead from the front, possibly for the only time in his career.
In pure visual terms, the Bowie "look" was becoming more bizarre. This was glam at the dirty edge, and the album reeks of decadence and too many one night stands. The sounds too, Stones influenced rock, jazz influenced pop, were quite new to those attuned to the Englishness of Kooks and After All. But musically this album showed a new side to Bowie, not perhaps understood at the time.
It shows him taking on board newer sounds, and breaking away from the constraints of the Spiders format. In many ways it was quite a departure from Ziggy. Bowie himself has said that he feels the album is more informed musically than its predecessor.The beautiful piano work of Mike Garson on the title track; the textures of Drive in Saturday (surely Bowie's best glam era single?), the guitar on Cracked Actor, these are as great as anything he'd done before. Indeed, it is hard to find a weak number on the album, save, perhaps, the cover of Let's Spend the Night Together. The sad thing about the album, in a way, is that it was so badly produced. One just wishes that Tony Visconti had been able to produce these songs, as the vocals are just a little too much in the background for my taste. Bowie was clearly trying to make a real rock album, putting the instruments up front, and whilst this works brilliantly on, say, Aladdin Sane itself (a sonic masterpiece), songs like "Time" and Panic in Detroit do get swamped a little. For this, the album should get 4 and a half rather than 5 stars; yet the sum of its parts makes it worthy of the 5th.

Bowie at the peak of his creativity
This is the raunchy glam-rock era of Bowie's music I much prefer, and although as a youth I wanted to have Brian Eno's babies artistically speaking, I thought Bowie lost it a little after Heroes and Low hit the scene. They were really great and innovative LPs though, and as I have all Eno's albums [now as CDs] I can forgive his collaboration on Low changing Bowie's musical path. Besides Bowie's creativity over the years has been little short of startling. Perhaps I prefer album's Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory and Diamond Dogs a tad more that Aladdin sane though. But anyway, this CD 'Aladdin sane' has the rock classic 'Jean Genie' on it, worth £5 of anyone's money in my book - consider all the other tracks a great bonus. I much prefer the cohesion of tracks originally recorded together, rather than a 'best of' compilation. Besides as shown by the other reviews here, your fave track from this album might not even make it on to a 'best of' CD. So I'm now re-amassing a `remastered' CD collection of all my aging Bowie LPs [that's 11 in all].

Apparently Aladdin Sane is a pun on 'A lad insane'. This album was the follow on from 1972's Ziggy Stardust album and tour. Aladdin Sane's lyrics were inspired by Evelyn Waugh's book 'Vile Bodies' (later filmed as 'Bright young things', a phrase that appears in the song). The superb glam-rock LP album cover of Bowie, photographed by Brian Duffy, is somewhat lost on the small CD insert though. The original LP cover image was printed in seven colours, a process not possible in the UK at the time, so the task was carried out in Switzerland instead.

Haven't noticed the 'remastered' difference over my original LP much though, but the sound quality on CD is excellent. Having watched BBC's 'Life on Mars' DVDs with its thumping 70s soundtrack, even my daughter [14] has built up a David Bowie MP3 collection. Oh, enough of this, just buy 'Aladdin sane' as a CD now! (and avoid download compression effects, get no LP pops and crackles, and keep this superb music for life).

A novelistic montage of kaleidoscopic imagery and Bowie's masterpeice.
Although 'Hunky Dory' has always just shaded this as my favourite Bowie album, listening to 'Aladdin Sane' again thirty-five years later, I'm convinced beyond reasonable doubt that this is his masterpiece. It almost doesn't quite hang together as an album but by its sheer brilliance and breadth it just does. Your other reviewers are very perceptive and there have been some very informed comments, recognising the qualities that seem to grow with every listen, however many times you hear it. It is as rewarding as a great novel with it's multitude of references, and echoes of other times and places from thirties Berlin to the golden age of Hollywood, as well as to the contemporary street hassle of seventies America. Each song triggers your imagination and seems to resonate beyond itself into a greater mindscape. Bowie's singing is incredible, and the band, arrangements and production are as good as it's ever going to get. Special mention of course must go to the inspired guitar playing of Ronson (it's a guitar masterclass) and the brilliant addition of Mike Garson that takes the album into the stratosphere - where did Bowie get him from ? Nobody else could pull an ace out of the pack the way Bowie did with Garson.

Opening with the pounding 'Watch That Man' (what a title and what an introduction!), the album never lets go, and not even the Stones at their very best could match the power of this opening track. From that to the decadent lounge jazz of the title track, all swirling piano chords and lost romanticism suddenly intercut with Garson's superb free-jazz solo that takes the song to another level altogether. 'Drive in Saturday' is a paean to the old movies that Bowie so loves and is packed with fabulous imagery. 'Panic in Detroit' is pure Stones again but Mick and Keith never "jumped the silent cars that slept at traffic lights". 'Time' melds the 'Threepenny Opera' with one of Bowie's most affecting show stoppers that kicks anything by Andrew Lloyd Webber into the front row of the balcony. 'The Prettiest Star' is the album's 'Kooks' and could so easily have come from 'Hunky Dory'. Over a simple blues riff, 'The Jean Genie' is Bowie's 'Walk on the Wild Side' and must have given Lou a broad smile (no mean achievement in itself). As other reviewers have already said, 'Lady Grinning Soul' is perhaps Dave's finest moment - ice cold beauty with Ronno and Garson sharing equal honours - a stunning finale. You can probably tell I like it.