David Bowie: "Bowie's Arizona Vision" Article (1973)

David Bowie’s "Bowie's Arizona Vision", a one-page article in Circus Magazine, February 1, 1973..

West Coast by Jacob Atlas

Bowie's Arizona Vision

David Bowie: An apparition of gleaming towers led to a song about loveless humans.

It was four o'clock in the morning on a railroad train headed for Phoenix, Arizona. Airplane-hater David Bowie, on his way to a gig, stared out of the window at the desolate, desert landscape when suddenly a set of gleaming metallic domes and towers loomed up in the distance. Quickly the vision coalesced in Bowie's mind of a city of surviving earthlings rearing its sterile magnificence on the face of a half-destroyed planet. As the train drew nearer, it revealed the grim sight of a nuclear testing station; but this only spurred David's imagination to further heights. By the time he arrived in Phoenix, Bowie had written "Drive-In Saturday," a cosmic rocker (destined to appear on his upcoming studio LP) about two humans in the desolate city of his vision who pore painfully over ancient videotapes of romance in a pathetic attempt to relearn the lost instinct of making love.

Meanwhile, the subject of another Bowie composition, "Jean Genie" ("A small jean genie snuck into the city...") has been preening himself for his return to the limelight. Iggy Stooge has been changing hair colors every other day (from silver and green to silver and blue to silver and pink) while waiting for the new Bowie-produced Iggy LP to come out and while preparing a stage show that will probably involve even more stage paint and peculiarity than the mixture of silver body paint and blood Iggy used to finish his act two years ago