Episode #71 | 2.9.21
David Bowie: The occult, cocaine, orgies, arrests, exorcisms, a weird flirtation with fascism and a dead body.
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In this episode
No musical artist better personified the hedonism of the seventies than David Bowie. He captivated the imaginations of music fans all over the world with a dizzying array of creative alter egos; Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke among them, and his obsession with occultist Aleister Crowley drove him down a dark, excessive hole filled with cocaine, orgies, arrests, fascism, death and madness that very nearly destroyed him.
Sources
David Bowie: The Oral History, by Dylan Jones
David Bowie: The Last Five Years, HBO
The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s, by Peter Doggett
Psychology Today: David Bowie’s Life at the Extremes
Ranker: David Bowie and His Mysterious Connections to the Occult and Paganism
Democrat & Chronicle: When Rochester Arrested David Bowie
Chron: David Bowie took the coolest mugshot of all-time after a marijuana arrest in 1976
Today’s Catholic: Demonic possession on the rise in U.S.
New York Times: Spotlights on the Stricken Scene
The Quietus: The Fall to earth: David Bowie, Cocaine and the Occult
Disgraceland is a podcast about musicians getting away with murder and behaving very badly. It melds music history, true crime and transgressive fiction. Disgraceland is not journalism. Disgraceland is entertainment. Entertainment inspired by true events. However, certain scenes, characters and names are sometimes fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
Music
Score by Jake Brennan.
Mixed and Engineered by Sean Cahalin.
Disgraceland theme song, "Crenshaw Space Boogie" written and produced by Jake Brennan. Performed by Jake Brennan, Bryce Kanzer, Jay Cannava and Evan Kenney. Mixed and engineered by Adam Taylor.
*illustrations by Avi Spivak @avispivak