Recording and Release
The song was premiered live well before being committed to tape, at Pirate's World, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or Celebrity Theatre, Phoenix (on 4 November 1972), according to various sources. It was initially offered for recording to Mott the Hoople but they turned it down, Bowie later saying that he didn't know why they refused it. However in his 1972 tour narrative, Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Star, Mott leader Ian Hunter appears utterly perplexed by the song's pop complexity when Bowie plays it to him, writing that it has "a hell of a chord rundown". Bowie claimed on VH1's Storytellers that his frustration with Mott the Hoople's rejection of the song led to his shaving of his eyebrows during the Ziggy Stardust tour, an alteration that remained evident in photographs as late as 1974.
Bowie's version, recorded on his return to Britain from his US tour, was released in April 1973 and remained in the charts for 10 weeks, reaching #3 in the UK charts. The B-side, "Round and Round", was a cover of Chuck Berry's track "Around and Around", a leftover from the Ziggy Stardust sessions. Bowie encyclopedist Nicholas Pegg describes "Drive-In Saturday" as "arguably the finest track on Aladdin Sane", as well as "the great forgotten Bowie single", which he attributed to the fact that it was never issued on a greatest hits album until almost 20 years after its release. Biographer David Buckley has called "Drive-In Saturday" and "Rebel Rebel" Bowie's "finest glam-era singles".
Read more about this topic: Drive-In Saturday
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