Can He Still Be a Hero?

It’s not quite time to make a reservation at the rest home for Ziggy Stardust, but it’s worth noting that David Bowie’s landmark album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars” came out in 1972, meaning that the carrot-topped character has now reached the traditional expiration age: Never trust an androgynous pied piper over 30.

Bowie himself turned 55 in January, and while he’s fit and personally content, with a 22-month-old daughter and a supermodel wife (Iman) keeping him on his toes, he knows what that age means in his chosen profession. This multimedia innovator didn’t even bother making a video for his new record, because the outlets don’t play videos by 55-year-olds.

“The ways for me to promote what I’m making become fewer and fewer as I get older, so I have to take advantage of touring and playing things live to people,” Bowie says. “I can’t obviously bank on any radio or video or anything like that, because I’m not the age for that kind of thing.”

What Bowie did or didn’t do to promote his work didn’t seem to matter much in the past decade. By the early ‘90s, he had made the transition from the slick, soulless chart-topper of the early 1980s to a rededicated if erratic artist. But such albums for Virgin Records as “Outside” and “Earthling” came and went without causing a ripple. Bowie quietly left the turmoil-racked label last year, he says, after the business department neglected to sign his extension.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity. Out of the blue, Bowie and his old record producer Tony Visconti, a storied team responsible for such Bowie milestones as 1971’s “The Man Who Sold the World” and 1977’s “Low,” returned to the studio last year for the first time since “Scary Monsters” in 1980.

The just-released “Heathen” intermittently carries whiffs of their past work, but the most obvious references--”Space Oddity” in “Slip Away” and “Heroes” in “Slow Burn”--weren’t Visconti productions. “Heathen” is distinctly its own record, and a liberating escape from the heavy concepts and arrangements that encumbered much of his ‘90s work. It’s relaxed, straightforward, quietly intense. Even the electronic adornments sound warm and organic in this melancholy world.

Rich, direct, emotional and sometimes playful, it includes versions of songs by the Pixies, Neil Young and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, along with Bowie originals that recharge his basic themes of obsession, alienation and mortality. The question of whether it will sell better than “Outside” (less than 200,000) or “Earthling” (under 250,000) is intriguing, but that’s never really the main point with Bowie, whose influence and impact have always been far greater than his record sales.

The Englishman arrived in the early ‘70s as a revolutionary figure, a gender-bending harlequin who distilled Velvet Underground rock and an inflated pop emotionalism into a message of personal liberation.

Adopting a succession of theatrical personae--Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke--Bowie popularized glam-rock, championed scrappy outsiders such as the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, and introduced theatrical staging to rock shows.

Later, he would bring elements of contemporary art and literature to his themes and methods in works that often focused on existential isolation and the fragmentation of personal identity. Along the way, he anticipated punk rock, goth, electronica and industrial rock, and became an actor, a painter and patron of cutting-edge art. His younger disciples include Trent Reznor, who co-billed Bowie on the 1995 Nine Inch Nails tour, and Moby, who invited Bowie to play on this summer’s edition of his Area2 tour.

“I wanted David Bowie to be involved in Area2, because apart from being my favorite musician of the 20th century, he’s a remarkable performer,” Moby says. “And almost no one has positively influenced popular music more than he has.”

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On the other hand, Bowie has sold a lot of albums in three decades, something that didn’t escape the executives at Sony’s Columbia Records when they heard some early takes from “Heathen.” They soon signed Bowie, through his ISO label, to a three-album deal.

“I’m a huge fan and have followed Bowie from my college years back in the ‘70s,” says Will Botwin, president of the Columbia Records Group. “I was immediately taken with the feeling of this record. It felt like a little bit of a throwback with Tony, but clearly a very current record and a very important record as well.

“It seemed to us that his visibility and the recognition of him having new albums out was fairly low. They weren’t events, and they didn’t seem to be heralded as much and didn’t seem to be talked about as much. We really felt like we could reinvigorate David’s career and establish a new level of fans in 2002 that maybe has been missing over the last handful of records.”

Bowie’s commercial impact and artistic value have rarely resided in the same works. The only time that critical consensus and cash register ka-ching coincided was during the 1970s stretch that included “Diamond Dogs” and “Young Americans,” with its surprising turn to R&B.; Bowie then moved into murkier waters, introducing electronics in the influential “Low,” “Heroes” and “Lodger.”

Those records and “Scary Monsters” weren’t big sellers, but Bowie made up for it in the 1980s. “Let’s Dance,” produced by Chic’s Nile Rodgers, became his second No. 1 single, and he was seduced by the success, turning out such mainstream-friendly albums as “Tonight” and “Never Let Me Down.”

Snapping to his senses, he formed an abrasive hard-rock quartet, Tin Machine, to revive his passion for music. The Virgin albums that followed in the ‘90s were a mixed lot, but some people could detect something alive and kicking.

“I particularly liked ‘Earthling’ and ‘Outside,’ ” says producer Visconti, who apprenticed on records by such ‘60s British rock greats as Procol Harum and the Move. “I thought they were really good, those two. I knew he was definitely working up to [“Heathen”]. I could hear that he had found his muse again. I found them a little inconsistent, but I heard my old friend shining through again.”

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Bowie had reunited with Eno--a collaborator on “Low” and producer of “Heroes” and “Lodger”-- for “Outside,” but that didn’t create nearly the stir in Bowiedom as the Visconti pairing, which Bowie says stemmed simply from a desire to work together in the studio again. Not that he treated it lightly.

“Being very aware that what we have done is held in fairly high esteem by the people that bought it,” Bowie says, “I was really wary of doing something that would cheapen the relationship or tarnish it in some way, if we just went in and rehashed or something. So I started stockpiling what I felt were really strong pieces of work, so we could go in with a very sound structure to begin with, which wouldn’t give us any excuse to lean back on the past ....

“That allowed us to work within a kind of signature mode. You can certainly tell it’s a Bowie-Visconti album, but it doesn’t have to borrow too much from the past.... I was very wary there are no cribs. ‘Sunday’ was cited by somebody as sounding quite like ‘Low,’ and there is nothing on ‘Low’ that even resembles ‘Sunday.’ That’s exactly the kind of thing that we didn’t do.... It doesn’t owe very much to the past in that way.”

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For their part, Columbia’s marketing people are breaking a sweat to increase his sales. If MTV won’t play a video on its own, they’ll shoot a commercial for the album that looks like a video and buy advertising time. If his old fans have evolved into couch potatoes, they’ll send him to the “Today” show and the A&E; cable channel (Bowie appears on the “Live by Request” show that premiered this weekend and repeats next Sunday and June 27).

Bowie, who has lived in New York for the past 10 years, will also make the rounds of the late-night network shows. The campaign benefits further from some coincidental activity: The Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills and New York has just opened a four-part retrospective of Bowie’s visual works, and the singer is the director of this year’s Meltdown, an eclectic festival of music, film and art in London that began Saturday and will continue through June 29.

“The guy has sold millions of records over the years,” says Larry Jenkins, Columbia’s senior vice president of marketing and media. “The last couple of albums have not sold that well, and I think we can get a lot of people back who for one reason or another didn’t buy those last few records.”

Bowie isn’t so sure.

“I don’t think I can do much about that,” he says. “I have a very loyal fan base, and other than that anomaly in the early ‘80s and the first Tin Machine album, I’ve had virtually the same record sales for nearly 35 years. I don’t really think it’s gonna change very much. And I’m very happy with that audience, it’s kept me going. If a major label could exert more weight and increase that audience, it would be lovely, but I’m not gonna lose sleep over it at all.”

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Area2 with David Bowie, Moby, Busta Rhymes, Blue Man Group, others, Aug. 13, Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine, (949) 855-8096. On sale Saturday.

“David Bowie: Sound + Vision,” Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Wednesdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Thursdays, 7 p.m. Through Sept. 15. Free. (310) 786-1000.