This is ground control to Sudler Hall...

By Daniel Silk

Of course, we can't, and that's why Ziggy Stardust is such a brilliant rock album: it includes everyone in its fantasy, and it wants everyone to believe. In 1972, during the last gasps of the Woodstock hangover, that degree of hopefulness must have merited at least an ironic snort. The album even wrote in Ziggy's subsequent implosion: "When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band." But goddammit, it worked: Ziggy Stardust brought Bowie world-wide attention, and ushered glam rock into the mainstream.

"If there are any rock albums that can be taken seriously as literature, this is among them," Tom Noerper, BK '97, told me over lunch. "It serves as a point of departure for reflections on the collective human condition." The Return of Ziggy and the Spiders: A Rock `n' Roll Reflection on Millenarian Themes at the end of the 20th Century, which comes to Sudler Hall the nights of Fri., Feb. 27 and Sat., Feb. 28, began as Noerper's baby. "I wanted to do it when I was in school at Tucson," Noerper said. "It's a messiah story, and the human condition hasn't really changed since the album's release. I feel like for the album to have its full effect, it needs to return."

So now, in 1998, the Yale College Performing Musicians' Cooperative brings Ziggy to Earth again, and just in time. These days, people have a moronic tendency to listen with condescension to music as audacious as Bowie's--to smugly "appreciate" it as kitsch, feeling smarter than it. But anyone who approaches this production with even a splinter of irony on his or her palate should quit school, because it's clearly done too much damage already. If things seemed bleak in '72, where the hell are we now? Pop culture at the end of the millennium is like a shatterproof mirror, intrinsically fragmented and self-consciously mimicking and laughing at itself, as if believing in anything would be like spitting into the wind. Frankly, I'm a mite unfamiliar with "millenarian themes," but if they're anywhere near as depressing as they sound, the new Ziggy production should beat them, scorn them, and leave them for dead. Tying the enormity of the past to the heartless infinity of the future is scary enough to make some people want out through the side. In other words, reflecting on the turn of the millennium seems, in some ways, like weighing your garbage.

But though I wish I could say we should just empty the recycling bin, it's always more fun to look at all the cool stuff we've produced, accumulated, and/or thrown out. That's why the word "classic" raises ears and reminds hearts, while "the (blank) of the future" scares the shit out of everyone short of the terminally ill. So with that in mind, the new Ziggy show should be like comfort food, a reminder that we can still sit around the fireplace with old friends and talk about movies and drugs and fears and secrets without tripping over the future while we're not looking.

And let me tell you, the eight-piece band cast as the Spiders kick it out with the vigor and attention to detail that comes from pining over a record or a moment. Led by Noerper on guitar (his band, The Eddie Gunther Sound, makes up the core of the ensemble) and featuring Liz Hazen, TC '00, on vocals "putting a new spin on Bowie's androgyny," the Spiders from Yale nail every intricacy and capture both the flamboyance and poignancy of the original album. What we're dealing with here is basically a rock concert embellished with visuals and an air of consequence, as though playing the songs in the right order will grant everyone three more wishes before the apocalypse comes and shuts the power down. Maybe it will. Best of all, the high-concept nature of the project ought to boil out any hokey tribute bandisms and leave us feeling thoughtful rather than filthy.

Of course, there is the matter of the "millenarian themes." As Noerper explained to me, these are explored through the multi-media aspect of the show. The apocalyptic beginning of the album is accompanied by a mushroom cloud; from then on, powerful images from our century, projected on screens and band members, supplement the songs and illustrate their stories--sort of an Emergency Broadcast Network take on Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. But the themes are all there in the music and lyrics; the multi-media material just approaches them through a separate avenue. Still another dimension will be added by bearded lady Jennifer Miller, director of her own New-York-based theater company. She opens Friday's show with sword-juggling, glass-eating, and gender politics. Really.

What strikes me as wonderful about this new Ziggy extravaganza is the way it takes an album that must have, at the time, seemed the very definition of a period piece, and shows why it's relevant now--a colossal epigraph. "Like great literature," Noerper said, "the record works through traditional motifs, but in a 20th-century-specific setting. The idea in '72 was that with the advent of the A-bomb, we could all really only have five years."

Ziggy is a savior and a martyr for any time, but now more than ever. The apocalypse is upon us; can you imagine life in the 21st century? Hell, an alien could land and top the pop charts, and people would still care more about Princess Di. In the thematic notes on "Five Years," Noerper explains that "the coming apocalypse unites us all in the undeniable knowledge of our common fate; the profundity of the moment delivers us from the mundane." I like this idea, mainly because I don't buy it. The profundity of the moment, more likely, would diffuse into undergrad organizations trying to sell that apocalypse shite on unsuspecting freshmen, who would just as soon join a singing group. But it's the thought that counts, and kudos to Noerper and the Spiders for not only inferring it from the album, but also for bringing it to us in such a rocking fashion. Hazen added, "The project has brought us all together the way the apocalypse is supposed to. I grew up on Bowie and I used to get angry that no one else in high school even knew who he was, but the music has really given us a feeling of community."

As we stumble into the millennium in a flurry of pamphlets, chat-rooms, and anthrax, can rock `n' roll deliver us from technological oblivion? As the show closer, "Rock `n' Roll Suicide," reminds us, "You got your head all tangled up/ but if I could only make you care./ Oh no love!/ You're not alone." Here's to hoping that The Return of Ziggy and the Spiders makes someone care.

Photograph of Liz Hazen by Hrishi Hirway.

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