Mick Ronson
A reluctant rock star, the quiet genius who just wanted to play music the way it was meant to be played.
Mick Ronson had what it took to be huge: striking good looks, on-stage charisma, stupendous musicianship. Yet he was the reluctant rock star, his personality more inclined to the role of sideman rather than being the main event. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ronson changed the course of David Bowie’s career, sparking his transition from acoustic folkie to androgynous electric spaceman. “Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character,” Bowie said in 1994. “He was very much a salt-of-the-earth type, the blunt northerner with a defiantly masculine personality, so that what you got was the old-fashioned yin and yang thing. As a rock duo I thought we were every bit as good as Mick and Keith or Axl and Slash. Ziggy and Mick were the personification of that rock’n’roll dualism.”
Ronson was so much more than just a guitarist. A classically trained pianist who was also proficient on violin and cello, he excelled as an arranger and producer too. His intuitive grasp of harmony and structure fed directly into his guitar playing, which prized melody and feel over flashy pyrotechnics. It was no coincidence that his biggest influences – Jeff Beck, George Harrison, Duane Eddy, The Shadows – all shared the same trait. Ronson was a great technician, but that was a by-product of his prodigious talent, not a goal. Serving the song was paramount. “It must be good in an emotional way,” he once said, considering the job of the guitarist. “It must have the right feeling.”
Ronson cut an unassuming figure. When drummer John Cambridge returned to his native
Hull from London in early 1970, with the intention of introducing Ronson to Bowie, he found him marking out a rugby pitch for the local parks department. Auditioning for Bowie and producer Tony Visconti, the shy and self-effacing Ronson gave no indication of just how good he was until he plugged in his Les Paul. “He just floored us,” Visconti marvelled.
His know-how was invaluable. Ronson’s guitar dictated the proto-metal of Bowie’s The Man Who
Sold The World; his arrangements illuminated Hunky
Dory’s baroque shadings; he oversaw strings and synths on Ziggy Stardust; he brought two-fisted glam and fucked-up R&B to Aladdin Sane.
As a mark of his quality and the esteem in which he was held, Ronson was always in demand, be it playing lead and co-producing Lou Reed, or working with Mott The Hoople. Bob Dylan enlisted him for his Rolling Thunder Revue. Ian Hunter adored him so much that they embarked on a decades-long collaboration that lasted until Ronson’s death from cancer, aged just 46, in 1993. Hunter paid tribute to his old friend on the moving Michael Picasso, its opening verse – ‘People used to stand and stare, at the spider with the platinum hair/They thought you were immortal’ – perfectly capturing the essence of Ronson’s otherworldly mystique. For him, he was just doing his job. For others he elicited awe. Mick Ronson was a genius. He just wasn’t interested in shouting about it.
Listen to this: The Width Of A Circle (David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World, 1970)