David Bowie, Rock N' Roll Star! Neil Young, Early Daze

Recent reissues document the birth of both the Spiders from Mars and Crazy Horse.

David Bowie—Rock N' Roll Star! (2024; 1971-1972)

Rock N' Roll Star!, like the other box sets the David Bowie estate has released since Conversation Piece in 2019, bypasses its parent album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to focus upon the ephemera surrounding its creation and release. It's not an expanded reissue, it's a document of an era, to use the popular parlance. 

This particular era is, of course, when Bowie cracked the code to stardom through his invention of Ziggy Stardust, the rock star who fell to earth. The birth of Ziggy was a long process but it wasn't necessarily painful, at least as listening experiences go. As told on Rock N' Roll Star, it's a process that began in a San Franciscan hotel room, where Bowie bids adieu to the age of Aquarius with "So Long 60s," an acoustic sketch that contains the germ of "Moonage Daydream" and culminates early in 1972, when he stepped away from the Ziggy sessions to play a pair of BBC sessions for John Peel and Bob Harris with the recently-formed Spiders from Mars.

The core of the Spiders—guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder, and drummer Mick Woodmansey—were in the Arnold Corns, a group Bowie masterminded during the Hunky Dory sessions. "Moonage Daydream" and "Hang On To Yourself" flopped as a single in 1971, then were revised for Ziggy, becoming bolder, wilder, and weirder. Arnold Corns sounded tentative and polite, qualities Bowie and the Spiders abandoned by the dawn of 1972, a shift that's felt here as Rock N' Roll Star! Begins the second of its five discs.

That first disc is rich with unreleased demos and early Spiders rehearsals but that Arnold Corns single has been in circulation for a while, showing up as bonus tracks on Rykodisc's 1990 reissue of The Man Who Sold The World. Much of this material has shown up elsewhere, as well, because if ever there was an album that's received its proper reissue due, it's Ziggy. This five-CD box is essentially the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Ziggy Stardust, following commemorative volumes for its 30th and 40th Anniversaries, not to mention an initial expansion as part of Rykodisc's Bowie reissue campaign of the 1990s. Add the Bowie at the Beeb collection into the mix—and you should, as a fair chunk of material is recycled here—and it could be easy to view this box as a bit of a retread.

Repetition does indeed play a big role in this box. Songs are rewritten and revised, tunes are tweaked in the studio, covers of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat" and Chuck Berry's "Round and Round" are a part of the regular repertoire. Whenever the Spiders hit the stage, they continue to play material from Hunky Dory and The Man Who Sold the World, a move that all working bands do. The constant churn of familiar tunes doesn't give the impression of forward movement and it also tends to overshadow the unearthing of a handful of real rarities—namely, the mournful folk-rock of "Shadow Man" and the freeze-dried rockabilly of "It's Gonna Rain Again." These are welcome additions to the catalog but the value of Rock N' Roll Star! isn't specifically archival. Rather, the box allows for an immersion into the time when Spiders from Mars gave Bowie's music and mystique, the era when they seemed invincible. 

Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Early Daze (2024; 1969)

Early Daze is much, much shorter than Rock N' Roll Star!—it falls just short of 40 minutes, the length of a good old-fashioned LP—yet in its own way, it documents a specific era just as thoroughly as the Bowie box. Effectively, Early Daze is an addendum to The Archives, Vol. 1 1963-1972, rounding up 10 recordings Neil Young made with the fledgling Crazy Horse in 1969, not long after he met them playing as the Rockets. Every one of these ten songs wound up on an official release somewhere down the road—"Everybody's Alone" took the longest to see the light of day, popping up on that first volume of the Archives—and a couple of the versions here are fairly close to the official canon; the mono mix of "Cinnamon Girl" contains different closing guitar flourishes, "Down By the River" adds an alternate, softer vocal to the original band backing track. 

As familiar as these songs are, these versions carry their own collective identity, capturing Neil and Crazy Horse at their lightest and loosest. The differences are readily apparent in the songs that were recorded later. "Helpless" ambles amiably, losing a bit of its piercing poignance, while "Winterlong" is given a dreaminess that suits how its melody sways. "Wonderin'," later given a greased-up combover on Everybody's Rockin', shuffles lazily, never hinting at rockabilly. It's also true that this early version of "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown," sung by its composer Danny Whitten, doesn't feel as sludgy as the rendition from Tonight's The Night. That's the key to the charm of Early Daze. It captures Neil Young and Crazy Horse before they indulged in the hard stuff, before the onset of heavy winds steered the group into the ditch. Here, they sound like a garage band giddy with possibility, generating garagey good vibes that are quite distinct from the rustic ramblings of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.