THE ZIGGY STARDUST BOX BOWIE (& YOU) DESERVED.

Back in June of 1996, I realized we were one year from the 25th anniversary of Ziggy.

Rykodisc’s deal with David was expiring but had been extended because his historic bond offering was taking longer than expected to finalize. That deal had to be completed before the rights to David’s records could be assigned elsewhere, but the bond terms dictated Rykodisc wasn’t going to keep them.

We’d convinced Isolar and RZO to let us release other limited items in this period, so I hoped we could persuade David to allow us to create a Ziggy box—otherwise, the anniversary wouldn’t have been recognized with any new material for the fans.

Even though I proposed it as a limited item, management denied the request—they didn’t want anything as high-profile as this would’ve been to affect future income that could negatively affect the bonds.

I wasn’t completely deterred, deciding to circumvent management and appeal directly to David. Typically, I went through Isolar or RZO to contact David, but neither party was going to accommodate this request after already saying no.

In my garage, I made two mock-ups—this one, which I still own, and another which I got to David via clandestine methods.

Management wasn't happy, but David thought it was a shame it may not happen, and it seemed like he might throw his weight around to get it done. He and I had a few more discussions about what it should contain, and we collaborated on design changes. This mock-up isn’t fully representative of even the initial idea, but David understood what I was going for and it was at least fun to contemplate.

As it became clear the Ziggy 25th Anniversary box wasn’t going to happen with Rykodisc, I offered to produce it for the next keepers of the catalog, gratis. That way, it might have had a chance to go directly into production as soon as the deal was closed.

It ended up being EMI, who egregiously decided to release all the albums sans the Rykodisc bonus tracks. Even EMI staffers were baffled at the time—they didn’t have access to many of our bonus tracks for years later, and some are still off the market.

I was told EMI (especially in the U.K.) had some bad feelings towards Rykodisc since they’d fumbled the Sound + Vision box release. Although I’m told David put my Ziggy proposal into the mix, it was rejected somewhere along the line. It’s possible he may have been shining me on to spare my feelings, or that EMI had too much hubris to accept an outside idea, but who knows?

The full details of the contents, the design, and how they connected directly to one of the Supermegabot Music Concern releases will be in Rykobook.

In the meantime, scroll down for some pics of the prototype.