Songs that changed the world FOREVER: Pt 1

Hello and welcome to part 1 of the ongoing series: Songs that changed the world forever!

Obviously, this is a very subjective topic, and I would not expect any of you to share my every sentiment on the songs I have deemed universe altering. My only intention here is to share with you the reader, music that has ushered me towards where I am today, and contributed to my heritage as a person as well as a musician, in a major way.

Without further ado: David Bowie: 5 Years

5 Years is the opening track off of Bowie’s 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spider’s from Mars. And although there are some serious Bowie classics on this record (Moonage Daydream, Starman, Ziggy Stardust, Suffragette City), this song in particular is the one that really blew my mind.

The first time I heard this song was in 2006ish. I was in Hollywood at the time, living within walking distance of Amoeba music, which as far as I can tell, is the only halfway decent reason to live in Hollywood whatsoever. I had been a self-proclaimed David Bowie fan my whole life, but up until this time, the only music of his that I really listened to was his 95 record Outside and all the subsequent albums: Earthling, Hours, Heathen, and Reality.

In general I found, that my Bowie experience was the opposite of most: bumping into various music aficionados in college, proclaiming Bowie was a genius, that Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane were his greatest works and so on and so forth, while I just stood there nodding, trying to reroute the conversation back to Outside and Mike Garson’s piano performance on the record, to try to disguise the fact, I had no idea what Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane really were. It became difficult to be a Bowie fan, having not heard a vast majority of his early catalogue.

So I decided on my almost daily trips to Amoeba music that fateful year, I would expand my Bowie horizons, and the very first purchase I made was Ziggy Stardust.

Suffice it to say, the album is amongst the greatest in rock history, and that’s all I’ll say, otherwise this blog will get really long. But nothing could have prepared me for the opening track. I threw the album into my car, completely unprepared for what I was about to hear, probably on my way to the grocery store, or a friend’s house, and the music began to wash over me. From the very beginning, when that funky drumbeat fades in, seemingly from some far off corner of the galaxy, I knew my life would never be the same. By the time the first verse had come and gone I was in such a state of otherworldly euphoria, my whole body began to tingle. Suddenly everything around me started to blur together, and this overwhelming sense of clarity descended upon my brain. And as the second verse came to its conclusion, I had a feeling like some cosmic hand came down and punched me in the solar plexus, and I distinctly remember starting to cry uncontrollably. Not tears of sadness, more like an “in case of emergency” evacuation of the soul. A total emotional explosion. I literally had to pull over because I couldn’t contain myself.

And my life was never the same since.

You can listen here: David Bowie - Five Years 

You can buy it here: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars