Bowie didn’t invent the faux farewell. It’s a tradition that probably dates back to vaudeville, if not Elizabethan theater, and Bowie knew of a pretty recent bait and switch: Frank Sinatra retired in 1971, telling reporters he planned to “read Plato and grow petunias.” And, he said, “I don’t want to put on any more makeup,” a sentiment Gene Simmons might share this week.
But Sinatra returned two years later, to much ballyhoo and chart success, with the album “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back.” Bowie was paying attention. “David was a big Sinatra fan,” his former manager, Tony DeFries, recently told Mojo magazine. Bowie’s retirement was a ruse, DeFries added, to generate publicity and whip up demand for a headlining tour of big venues in the United States. It worked; in 1974, Bowie played arenas across the country, including two shows at Madison Square Garden.
Bowie’s exit was an opportunistic hoax, but other retirements may be sincere at the moment they’re made. In 1977, Elton John announced he was done touring while onstage at Wembley Stadium in London. Though he was back two years later, he talked repeatedly about retiring, and in 2014, he told a French crowd, “No more shows, no more music.” The next day, his representative assured a reporter, “Elton was only joking.” In September 2018, the singer started his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which ended in July 2023 and grossed $939 million, based on figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. So far, he hasn’t reneged.
Saying a dramatic goodbye is good business, and so is the Lazarus return. It’s easy to speculate that money is the chief motivation, but there are other reasons, too. “I’ve got a family I never go home to,” Ozzy Osbourne said when he retired in 1992. Three years later, he was back with a Retirement Sucks tour, leaving fans to speculate about how much or little he enjoyed getting to know his family.
The retirement ruse is common among hard rock bands (Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Black Sabbath), but other perpetrators of the old switcheroo include the Who, Cher, Meatloaf, Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Phish and LCD Soundsystem, who made a documentary about its farewell in 2011, only to return five years later. “I’d never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work,” Trent Reznor told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2009, when he sent his band Nine Inch Nails into that good night. After four years, he unretired, which gave them something in common.
After Bowie retired in 1973, then unretired in 1974, he retired a second time in 1975. A year later, the journalist Cameron Crowe interviewed him for Playboy and challenged the singer, asking how he could release a new album despite having retired twice.
