David Bowie in concert at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, February 26, 1976.Dennis Robinson/The Globe and Mail
David Bowie was the first rock star to appear in a Broadway play. It was 1980 and the show was The Elephant Man, about a hideously deformed man in Victorian England who struggles to preserve his humanity after he is put on public display as a freak.
It is difficult, in the immediate wake of Mr. Bowie's death on Sunday at age 69, to do justice to all the ways he influenced popular music. But his risky decision to appear in The Elephant Man comes as close as anything to capturing the essence of rock 'n' roll's most inspiring performer.
The role required the rock star to recreate the Elephant Man's deformities without the aid of prosthetics. Mr. Bowie had only the tilt of his head, the way he spoke and the movement of his limbs to portray John Merrick, the man on whom the play is based.
It was a perfect Bowie moment. As a musician, he had rocketed to fame in 1972 by putting on garish makeup, dying his hair and turning into an androgynous rocker named Ziggy Stardust. To the mainstream world of 1972, he was a freak – but to teenagers who felt just as strange in the world as Ziggy did, he was beloved.
Eight years and two personality changes later, Mr. Bowie again captured the hurt of a lonely, misunderstood grotesque, this time on Broadway, but without makeup to hide behind. He nailed it. New York theatre critics called his performance "brilliant."
There is no question that David Bowie changed popular music. He turned rock performances into theatre. He invented glam rock and foreshadowed punk rock. He brought avant-garde influences into the mainstream, and he kept searching for new sounds into the final days of his life.
But as important as that influence was, his legacy lies elsewhere. The masks changed, but David Bowie's deeply felt humanity was constant. All the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people, and all the nobody people, they knew who he was singing for.