"Not only is this the last show of the tour", David Bowie announced at London's Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973 by way of introduction to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "but it is the last show we will ever do." The recording of that nugget of rock history appears in this box collecting most of Bowie's music from the years of his ascent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.
Imagine that Five Years (allegedly the first of a series, though Bowie has always announced many more projects than he's released) was all the documentation there was of his musical career—that he'd entered the public sphere with his 1969 single "Space Oddity", retired from the stage after the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour, and vanished to a Tibetan mountaintop following a loving salute to his roots, Pin Ups. He'd certainly be some kind of glam-rock legend, even more than his friend and rival Marc Bolan. He probably wouldn't have the enduring cultural cachet he commands in our world, but there would still be a fervent cult around his three great albums and three iffy-to-good ones, and even more interest in his live recordings and ephemera. To put it differently, Hedwig and the Angry Inch would be the same; LCD Soundsystem wouldn't.
In our world, though, Five Years is only a slice of a much longer curve. The earliest album in the box, 1969's David Bowie—a.k.a. Space Oddity, a.k.a. *Man of Words/Man of Music—*wasn't Bowie's recorded debut, or even his first self-titled album. (In fact, there could theoretically be a Five Years 1964-1968, tracing his evolution from rock 'n' roll wannabe to fussy vaudevillian, although it would mostly be kind of awful.) It was, however, a follow-up to his first successful single, a haunting novelty record about a lost astronaut that had been released a week and a half before the moon landing. The young singer/acoustic guitarist behind these songs obviously has a mountain of charisma, a gift for hooks, and a taste for the language of experimental science fiction, and not the faintest idea what to do with them most of the time. So he wears his influences on his sleeve ("Letter to Hermione" is intensely Tim Buckley-ish; "Memory of a Free Festival" is a hippie rewrite of "Hey Jude"), and constantly overreaches for dramatic effect.
As it turns out, what he really needed was a good hard rock'n'roll band. Bowie assembled a very short-lived group called the Hype with guitarist Mick Ronson and bassist Tony Visconti; by the time they recorded The Man Who Sold the World in April, 1970, they'd picked up drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and gone back to using their singer's name. The Man Who Sold the World is the dark horse of the Bowie catalog. There were no singles issued from it, and the title track didn't really become a standard until Nirvana covered it decades later. But toughening up the arrangements made Bowie's stagey warble vastly more effective, and a lot of his artistic risks paid off: the album's opener is a ferocious eight-minute metal sci-fi opus, "The Width of a Circle", with some of the most overtly homoerotic lyrics a pop musician had ever intoned ("He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/ And showed me the leather belt 'round his hips").