David Bowie entered the music world as David Jones in the 1960s, trained on a plastic saxophone. When he left that world Sunday at age 69, he had altered it profoundly with a string of albums, musical styles, personas and transformative images, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke.
Bowie was creating until the end. Only two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his latest album, the dark and shape-shifting "Blackstar," Bowie died after an 18-month battle with cancer.
As with the recording and release of his latest albums, the Bowie camp kept the singer's cancer struggle a secret until the end. A brief statement via the artist's Facebook page said he died while "surrounded by his family."
"While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family's privacy during their time of grief."
His longtime producer Tony Visconti wrote, "His death was no different from his life — a work of art. He made 'Blackstar' for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn't, however, prepared for it."
The loss came as a shock to the music world, where Bowie's influence spanned decades and genres.
"As well as being a wonderful and kind man, he was an extraordinary artist, and a true original," the Rolling Stones said in a statement
Kanye West posted on Twitter that Bowie "was one of my most important inspirations, so fearless, so creative, he gave us magic for a lifetime."
Bowie was a fearless innovator on many fronts, starring in art films and videos, upending fashion with his many stage outfits and guises, and dabbling in art and theater. He made an incalculable contribution as a role model for sexual tolerance, as he experimented with gay, bisexual and transgender characters and images in his art and personal life. But he was above all a creative force in music, from his multimedia concert performances through 27 stylistically varied and often challenging studio albums. Along the way he created signature singles such as "Golden Years," "Changes," and the No. 1 hits "Fame" and "Let's Dance." He went on to influence several generations of artists, from Madonna to Nine Inch Nails.
David Robert Jones was born in Brixton, a district of London, on Jan. 8, 1947, and began playing a plastic saxophone at age 13 in tribute to the jazz giants he had discovered through his half-brother's music collection. He dabbled in rock, folk music and psychedelia and crooned in a voice that resembled British thespian Anthony Newley.
In deference to the Monkees' Davy Jones, he changed his name to Bowie in the mid-'60s and his art-school background led him to explore mixed media, film, mime, even Buddhism. He finally broke out when he recorded "Space Oddity" in 1969, a Top 5 hit in the U.K. The song introduced his first persona, the doomed Major Tom, and set Bowie on a path that he would follow the rest of his career: an otherworldly character inhabiting many guises, yet shaded in the drama and tragedy of human experience.
With "The Man Who Sold the World" in 1970, Bowie challenged any preconceptions about who he might be or what he might sound like by posing in a dress on the album cover and embracing hard rock for the first time in tandem with his first great collaborator, guitarist Mick Ronson. Over the next decade, each new album would present a new look, a new sound, a dizzying exploration of art and music as a transformative personal experience. Just as two of his heroes, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs, manipulated images and text to create something fresh, Bowie toyed with style and genre.
"I have no signature sound, and I think that's a valid way to represent oneself as an artist in the latter part of the 20th century," Bowie once told the Tribune. "I like to use style as a medium in itself, the idea that a particular kind of thing can be said in a particular style. I've so many styles now that I really don't have to go outside myself anymore to make records."
With Ziggy Stardust, Bowie invented his most indelible persona. "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" brought to life an alien rock star who briefly rules the world and then is destroyed by it. At the end of the tour to promote the album, Ziggy gave a farewell address to a London audience in 1973. "This show will stay the longest in our memories," Bowie announced. "Not just because it is the end of the tour, but because it is the last show we'll ever do."
The pronouncement was front-page news in England the next day and solidified Bowie's status as a post-modern rock star, beholden to no one musical or artistic tradition, but instead free to play, manipulate, reconfigure and destroy any and all of them at any time.
Even as Ziggy Stardust took his career to a new level, Bowie used his fame to elevate his musical heroes. He championed the underappreciated Velvet Underground by covering its songs and producing "Transformer," the breakthrough solo album by the Velvets singer Lou Reed, in 1972. He handed one of his best songs, "All the Young Dudes," to Mott the Hoople and later began a collaboration with the Stooges' Iggy Pop, producing his solo albums "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life."
In the same era, he would also star in the self-referential art film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" and collaborate with future R&B star Luther Vandross on the "Young Americans" album, in which he appropriated soul music in his "Thin White Duke" guise.
In the late '70s he worked with Brian Eno and Visconti on a trio of albums in Berlin that would merge influences from Euro-disco, German art rock and punk: "Low," "Heroes" and "Lodger." These solidified his reputation as not just a top-shelf pop star, but as an innovator who identified with underground music and had a knack for merging it with his own aesthetic.
"The longer I stay involved in what I do, the more I realize that if I'm in an area that's uneasy, edgy, adventurous, it'll be my best work," Bowie told the Tribune of his collaborations with artists such as Eno. "With Brian, we work from a basis of total improvisation — nothing's prewritten. We try to work far more on the edge of the mainstream than anything else, to pick up the most interesting bits, the leftover bits that other people don't use, and come up with these strange hybrid animals."
Bowie continued to have hits in the '80s, working with artists such as Queen ("Under Pressure") and Chic's Nile Rodgers ("Let's Dance"), though his days as an innovator seemed to be waning. He struggled in the '90s to reset his artistic compass. He played what he said would be a final greatest hits tour, and formed the rock band Tin Machine. It didn't work.
"My vanity won't let me work to houses with 20 or 30 people," he later told the Tribune. "I did try it with Tin Machine: A small room packed with people is a cool thing, but it's not economical. I was paying for that band to work, and I was gradually going through all my bread, and it became time to stop. I had to build my audience back up again."
Bowie regained his focus in the new century by reuniting with Visconti, the producer who played a major role in many of his '70s successes. They worked on two albums together, "Heathen" (2002) and "Reality" (2003), before Bowie went into seclusion for nearly a decade after suffering a 2004 heart attack. His return in 2013 with "The Next Day," once again co-produced by Visconti, came as a surprise and drew widespread acclaim. "Blackstar" found Bowie working with a relatively obscure but excellent jazz quartet helmed by saxophonist Donny McCaslin. On his final album, Bowie was once again exploring new territory that didn't sound like quite like anything else in his vast catalog.
In a sense all of Bowie's music — no matter how arty and alien it could appear at times — was also deeply personal. This came across in the intimacy of his late-career albums. The video for his latest single, "Lazarus," shows him lying in bed, singing about the afterlife.
The sense of mortality was there in the title song from "Heathen" as well, which contains some of his most fragile and emotive singing: "And when the sun is low / And the rays high / I can see it now / I can feel it die."
In an interview, Bowie said the track was recorded in a remote mountain studio outsideWoodstock, N.Y.
"I wrote it very early in the morning up in the studio, with this extraordinary view of the mountains," Bowie said. "It was quite idyllic but at the same time barren, isolated. The words were flooding out of me, and I was literally crying as they were. I didn't want to write these words, because in a way I was addressing life itself, and that at some point I would have to relinquish my hold on it."
Bowie is survived by his wife, Iman, and his children, Duncan Jones and Alexandria Zahra Jones.
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
Tribune wire services contributed to this report.
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