David Bowie – Mick Ronson 1972

David Bowie – Mick Ronson 1972 – illustrated here in London as front men for The Spiders From Mars, in November, 1972. Bowie age 25 and Ronson age 26.

The Spiders from Mars were rock singer David Bowie’s backing band in the early 1970s, and initially consisted of Mick Ronson on guitars, Trevor Bolder on bass guitar, and Mick Woodmansey on drums.
The band’s name came from the UFO sighting on October 27, 1954, where a stadium crowd thought they had witnessed Martian spacecraft which cast off a thin filament material, later hypothesized to be webs from migrating spiders.

The group had its origins in Bowie’s earlier backing outfit the Hype, which featured Ronson and Woodmansey, but Tony Visconti on bass. They were briefly signed as a band on its own, known as Ronno. With Bolder taking over bass, they were subsequently named via the landmark 1972 Bowie concept album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and were billed as such on the accompanying large-scale Ziggy Stardust Tour.

Bowie had originally wanted keyboardist Rick Wakeman to join the band (Wakeman had played piano on Bowie’s second album and on Hunky Dory and was active with the band The Strawbs); however, Wakeman declined and instead joined progressive rock band Yes.
Wakeman would feature uncredited on the album, and would collaborate with Bowie again on Absolute Beginners. The Spiders from Mars were present again on Bowie’s 1973 album, Aladdin Sane. Another leg of the tour followed that year, with the final show captured in the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

The group joined Bowie’s stage persona, Ziggy Stardust in the theatrical style of the material’s presentation. Ronson’s guitar and arranging during the Spiders from Mars era not only fit into this style, but also provided much of the underpinning for later punk rock musicians.

Mick Ronson’s trademark sound came from his sanded ’68 Gibson Les Paul guitar (later donated to the Hard Rock cafe in New York), a Marshall Major 200 watt amp (nicknamed “The Pig”) plus an angled 4×12″ Marshall cab and the use of a Cry-Baby wah-wah.

Ronson died of liver cancer on April 29, 1993, at age 46.
On January 10, 2016, Bowie died of liver cancer in his New York City apartment. He was 69.

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