“Flying saucer rock and roll – I couldn’t understand a thing they said, but that crazy beat just-a stopped me dead!”
Starting with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine unidentified flying objects near Mount Rainier on the outskirts of Seattle in June 1947 and the reported crash of an alien craft in Roswell just two weeks later, an untold number of UFO sightings were reported within the United States during the 1950s. Hoping to cash in on the mania, rockabilly artist Billy Lee Riley released “Flyin’ Saucer Rock and Roll” in February 1957 – and then watched it shoot to the top of the charts shortly thereafter.
While the song was obviously a spoof as opposed to serious dissertation of alien visitors from outer space, science fiction and rock and roll would become forever linked a decade later when a new crop of recording artists combined their love of sci-fi novels with their musical talents. Instead of novelty hits like “Flyin’ Saucer Rock and Roll,” their creations were in essence “short stories” told through individual songs and concept albums containing longer narratives, giving rise to sci-fi rock as a hybrid form of literature and musical entertainment.
In 2018, music journalist Jason Heller published Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, the first serious exploration of this unique genre. While David Bowie may be the most famous talent to have combined science fiction and rock – in both songs like “Space Oddity” and such albums as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars – he was far from the only practitioner of the emerging genre.
One of the most influential of these sci-fi musical pioneers was Jimi Hendrix. Upon moving to London in 1966, for instance, Hendrix was lent a copy of Philip José Farmer’s Night of the Light, which served as the inspiration for the legendary guitarist’s breakout hit “Purple Haze.” In the novel, mysterious radiation causes reality to distort on an alien planet, and the sunspots visible from the star it orbits are described as having a “purplish haze.”
Hendrix had been a fan of science fiction since his youth, especially drawn to the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movie serials of Universal Studios. Jason Heller notes in Strange Stars that Jimi and his brother Leon even once saw a UFO hovering above their backyard. Hendrix remained infatuated with science fiction throughout his life and his roommate in London – Chas Chandler of the Animals – had his own sci-fi collection that Hendrix regularly devoured.
The steady diet served as the inspiration for a number of additional Hendrix songs, including “Third Stone from the Sun” and “Up from the Skies” – both of which contain narratives about alien visitations to Earth and were influenced by George Stewart’s Earth Abides, which tells the story of civilization being reborn after its decimation by a deadly disease.
In California, meanwhile, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds discovered that each of them were science fiction fanatics as well. Crosby in particular spent his youth reading such authors as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. Between 1966 and 1967, the Byrds recorded a small handful of sci-fi songs that included “Mr. Spaceman” and “C.T.A.-102,” which was named after a Soviet Union report suggesting that radio waves might be signals from alien lifeforms.
While the likes of Jimi Hendrix, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn were raised on science fiction, for a young Marc Bolan it was fantasy novels. Although primarily remembered for his 1971 hit “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” with T. Rex, the British singer-songwriter released a steady stream of albums during the 1960s and 70s featuring songs that were influenced by C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Marc Bolan’s first group was a folk-style duo named Tyrannosaurus Rex who wore long, extravagant robes and sat cross-legged onstage during their concerts, performing songs based on the myths, legends and magical creatures of the past. Their albums, meanwhile, had names like Prophets, Seers and Sages and Unicorn. Tyrannosaurus Rex was eventually shortened to T. Rex and likewise evolved into a full-fledged rock band, but the source of inspiration remained within the realm of fantasy for Marc Bolan until his death in 1977.
Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane was the first artist to embrace science fiction not just for individual songs but an entire album that tied them together into a full-length narrative. Blows Against the Empire was released in 1970 and told the story of a hijacked spaceship that is used as a modern-day Noah’s Ark to carry segments of humanity away from the oppression of planet Earth.
Blows Against the Empire also has the distinction of being the first musical recording ever nominated for a Hugo Award, presented each year at the World Science Fiction Convention in honor of the best sci-fi narratives. It wouldn’t be until 2017 that another album would be similarly recognized with a nomination in the “Best Dramatic Presentation” category – rap group Clipping’s Splendor and Misery.
On February 10, 1972, the merging of science fiction and popular music was taken to an entirely different level when David Bowie re-imagined himself as an orange-haired, jumpsuit-and-red-boot wearing rock star named Ziggy Stardust and performed with his new band – dubbed the Spiders from Mars – at the Toby Jug pub in London.
Like other musical artists emerging in the latter half of the 1960s, Bowie had been a bona fide science fiction aficionado in his youth after having read Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were likewise amongst his favorite authors, as well as British sci-fi television shows like Quatermass and Doctor Who.
Science fiction crept into Bowie’s songwriting early in his career with “We Are Hungry Men” from his 1967 debut album. The song relates how the world’s population has exploded at some point in the future, leading to fascism, reproductive repression and oxygen rationing. It ends with Bowie reciting the final lines in a robotic voice similar to that of the Daleks from Doctor Who.
Two years later, David Bowie recorded “Space Oddity.” Bowie had been obsessed the following year by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Based on a short story by Arthur C. Clark, 2001 proved the perfect film to not only watch multiple times while stoned but to inspire Bowie to further embrace his own science fiction leanings.
By the time The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released in June 1972 – four months after Bowie’s first performance as his alter-ego – Ziggy Stardust was already an international sensation. Borrowing from Star Trek fans who dressed in costume at science fiction conventions, attendees of David Bowie concerts began to cosplay as Ziggy, blurring the line between science fiction and rock music even further.
For a later follow-up album, Bowie originally intended to adapt George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a concept album but was denied permission from Orwell’s estate. With a handful of songs already written, David Bowie decided to rework the concept into his own story of a post-apocalyptic futuristic world, naming the resulting album Diamond Dogs while still including the initial songs based on George Orwell’s novel.
In 1977, Alan Parsons had a similar problem when he wanted to adapt Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Asimov himself was intrigued by the idea but adaptation rights had unfortunately already been sold. Parsons solved the problem by eliminating the comma in the title for the Alan Parsons Project’s I Robot album and flipping Asimov’s theme that robots would never hurt their human creators by arguing that artificial intelligence poses a legitimate threat instead.
Literature and music may be two different mediums – with science fiction and rock being unique genres within each – but since the mid-1960s, sci-fi and rock-and-roll have found a way to co-exist nonetheless. Jimi Hendrix may never have found the same level of success without the likes of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers to stir his imagination as a child, and the same can be said of David Bowie’s absorption of 2001: A Space Odyssey in so many darkened theaters over the spring of 1968.
In 1958, Danny & the Juniors sang that “rock and roll is here to stay.” Blows Against the Empire, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and I Robot – along with ELO’s Time and Kilroy Was Here by Styx from the 1980s, all the way to Clipping’s Splendor and Misery in 2017 – have proven that the same can be said of that unique hybrid of science fiction and popular music.
Anthony Letizia