David Bowie did not choose the name of his third album, nor the dress on its cover. The Man Who Sold the World arrived in the United States on November 4, 1970, as a record Bowie had written and recorded but whose title and packaging slipped beyond his control.
Sessions at Trident and Advision
Work on the album had begun in London studios Trident and Advision, with sessions running from April 17 to May 22 of that year. Producer Tony Visconti shaped a sound that left behind the mostly acoustic folk-rock of Bowie's 1969 record. In its place came hard rock with blues-rock edges, played by two musicians who would later form the core of the Spiders from Mars: guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick Woodmansey. The British release did not follow until April 8, 1971, on Mercury Records. By then the album had already spent months in American shops, and the gap between the two editions only added to the sense that the record was arriving in pieces.
Bowie had wanted to call the record Metrobolist, a nod to the 1927 film Metropolis. The label changed it to The Man Who Sold the World without asking him. The American sleeve, drawn by Michael J. Weller, showed a cowboy in front of the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital. The British version went further: a photograph by Keith MacMillan of Bowie in a blue dress designed by Michael Fish, his pose borrowed from a Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Hard rock, phasers and darker lyrics
The music matched the strangeness of its packaging. The lyrics turned darker than anything Bowie had written before, circling madness, religion, technology and war. The eight-minute opener "The Width of a Circle" stretched into progressive rock, with Ronson's guitar feeding back and improvising around Bowie's voice. On the title track, Ronson built a cyclical riff while Bowie's vocal ran through a heavy phaser effect. Not every track leaned on hard rock. "After All" stayed closer to folk-rock, with a music-hall-flavoured refrain, while "Saviour Machine" used blues-rock and hard rock to imagine computers taking control of humanity. The title song also drew on William Hughes Mearns's 1899 poem "Antigonish", and Bowie's vocal was heavily treated with a phaser effect.
Yet no song from the album came out as a single. The record failed commercially in both the United States and Britain, even though American critics were kinder than British ones at first. A 1972 reissue from RCA Records, with a black-and-white photo of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, finally put the album into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The album's authorship later became a point of dispute. Officially Bowie was credited with all the music, but Tony Visconti maintained that the songs were written by all four members of the group. Bowie pushed back in 1998, arguing that the chord sequences were recognisably his own.
By then, Bowie had become a different kind of star, and the album looked less like a misstep than a rehearsal. The two Micks who played on it would soon be onstage behind Ziggy Stardust. The hard-rock turn of 1970 had cleared the ground for everything that followed.
The hard-rock turn of 1970 had cleared the ground for everything that followed.
In 2020, for the record's 50th anniversary, the album was remixed under its original title, Metrobolist. The name Bowie had wanted from the start finally appeared on the cover, long after the dress, the cowboy and the psychiatric hospital had become part of the story.