On the slower first side, he appears on "Moonage Daydream" alone, and even then is only identifiable by his distinctly caricatured voice: "Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe / Put your ray gun to my head / Press your space face close to mine, love / Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah!"

Deep into side two, "Ziggy Stardust" lends the haziest of details to the "story." Some speculate that the song is narrated by Ziggy's bandmates (suggested by the line, "Then we were Ziggy's band," but not definitively), and some speculate that his bandmates tried to kill him (suggested by the line, "Or should we crush his sweet hands"), but no clear narrative is discernable. "Ziggy sucked up into his mind," and that's all we know for sure.

The "Rock and Roll Suicide" that makes up the final track is equally without narrative, though not without details. There are cigarettes, fingers, clocks, cafes, cars, a bored walk through what one imagines to be the same city pictured on the album's cover, a sunrise, and a pervading sense of isolation that Bowie blasts at the end of the song with the screamed reassurance, "You're NOT alone!" The song is widely interpreted as the end of the "story," and the suicide as being physical, and Ziggy's own.

No such meanings are apparent within the song, and are gleaned from the title alone. It sounds a lot more like a song about one of Bowie's alienated fans, and both an admonishment against and a prayer for what rock can turn you into. If that's not muddy enough for you, let me put it this way: it's the perfect compliment in mood and tempo to the opening track, "Five Years," but neither seems to have anything literally to do with each other, or with the rest of the album, and almost certainly not with Ziggy. Yet without them, the album would fall apart. Such is the nature of this "concept album."

The final effect of all this confusion is to further reinforce the fact that Ziggy exists, and yet he does not. He literally exists as a character, and yet floats in and out of the record as a mere idea. Perhaps this again ties into Ziggy's status as "messiah." As a real person, he is all but meaningless, and his story is drawn in the sketchiest of details, but as the embodiment of all that is good and bad about rock and roll, he straddles the album like a colossus.

Bowie's status as a worshippable star began with this album. There is deep irony in this - that a mere invention could gain status as an icon. And yet, in another way, it makes perfect sense, in the same way that rock makes that perfect, skewed sort of sense to those who realize its danger, and even its emptiness, and choose to believe anyway. The record rode into history on the strength of rock's central mystery, and it remains there forever, as a sort of apocryphal, self-aware, self-analyzing addition to the rock cannon. Call it The Last Temptation of Ziggy Stardust.