The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [127] GOLDEN YEARS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1975; single and Station to Station LP

  * * *

  In isolation, this was Bowie’s most perfect exhibition of disco music as an art form—a tightly controlled, intensely hypnotic weave of electronic certainty and human vulnerability. At its heart was a simple two-chord* (F#-E) groove reminiscent, in very different circumstances, of “Aladdin Sane” [70]. In keeping with the restlessness of the lyric, however, the song was actually set in the key of B major, never actually arriving at its root chord—although one of the two guitar riffs that shaped the groove was solidly based there. The magical ingredients were percussive: the rattling of sticks against the hi-hat cymbal from the start, the startling clack of woodblocks, the sudden drum fills. Bowie straddled all these elements with consummate ease, channeling the spirit of Elvis Presley (to whom he sent a tape of the song) in the verses, then touching a haughtier, more strident tone in the chorus.

  Seductive and knowing, he sounded like the most arrogant and yet attentive of lovers, promising a full millennium of fidelity. But in the wake of the occult excursion of “Station to Station” [126], “Golden Years” began to display another face. “Invoke often,” wrote Aleister Crowley of the holy names, and in his belief system, the “higher self” was represented by the Holy Guardian Angel. Sure enough, it was an “Angel” that Bowie invoked throughout the song, each time cloaking the word in an otherworldly echo. In this light, the most innocent of lines began to assume menacing proportions: the thousand years sounded Hitlerian; the instruction to his love to rise suggested that he/she was actually dead. No wonder that the supposedly pure message of love carried a darker (literally) subtext: “run for the shadows,” Bowie insisted repeatedly, as if only in darkness could he feel truly safe.

  [128] WORD ON A WING

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1975; Station to Station LP

  * * *

  Context was all in the first half of Station to Station: after two flirtations with darkness, Bowie seemed to utter a plaintive cry to the Christian God, and to Jesus, the “sweet name” of his childhood prayers, for salvation. Three years later, Bob Dylan’s apparent “conversion” to evangelical Christianity sparked unease and contempt from many of his followers. Bowie’s equally stark avowal of faith—in equally dire personal circumstances—caused barely a whisper.

  In part, that was because few of Bowie’s fans looked to him for spiritual guidance, although he had been far more consistently vocal about matters metaphysical (and sociopolitical, for that matter) than Dylan. Only when he knelt to the ground during the Freddie Mercury tribute concert in 1992 to recite the Lord’s Prayer before a packed Wembley Stadium, and a global television audience, did his religious conduct arouse any comment. There was also a profound distinction of tone: where Dylan hectored his audience, and the wider society beyond them, Bowie offered an intimate relationship with the divine spirit, part confession, part conversation, part plea for help.

  Typically, he was ambiguous about his motives. He claimed in a 1976 interview that he had written the song “when I felt very much at peace with the world. I had established my own environment with my own people for the first time. . . . What better way can a man give thanks for achieving something that he had dreamed of achieving, than doing it with a hymn?” Four years later, his explanation was very different: “There were days of such psychological terror when making [The Man Who Fell to Earth]. . . . It was the first time I’d really thought seriously about Christ and God in any depth, and ‘Word on a Wing’ was a protection. It came as a complete revolt against elements that I found in the film.”

  “Word on a Wing” was cleverly placed on the (vinyl) album, opposite the similarly titled “Wild Is the Wind” [131]—a stark contrast between romantic love and religious devotion, each delivered with unshakable conviction. Both conveyed loss of control, to the extremes of passion and despair, but both were the product of consummate professionalism. Arguably Bowie has never sounded more desolate on record than when he almost cried the words “Oh Lord” late in this song, twisting the first syllable in pain, holding tight to the second in hope. But his absolutely precise phrasing proved how carefully he’d planned the moment: this was an accounting of the soul, not a spontaneous outburst from its depths. That attention to detail was evident throughout his performance, in the way that his voice was mixed right in the listener’s ear, without a trace of echo or artifice, in the opening verse; then echoed as if from the heart of a church as he serenaded the sweet angel of salvation; and finally left harsh and strident as he offered his prayer. To reinforce the appropriate mood, there was the synthesized sound of a church organ—and then, as the track died away, the electronic “voice” of an “Ave Maria,” the symbol of the Catholic Mass.

  For once, Bowie’s lyrics disavowed his natural inclination for metamorphosis. Like “Station to Station” [126] and “TVC15” [129], however, “Word on a Wing” was awash with changes—of tone, of production, of musical structure. It repeated the trick of “Golden Years” by opening with the dominant chord of the key of B major (on synthesizer), though this time he swiftly resolved matters in a hesitant piano motif. Thereafter he utilized as wide a palette of instrumental textures as of vocal settings, with the tension of a howling guitar buried deep in the mix like a hidden emotion, while vibes and acoustic guitar signaled humanity. What remained in the mind, though, was the prayer—and the taint of the grand illusion that, like the class interests that united warring nations in Jean Renoir’s thirties film of the same title, threatened to be more enduring than any hope of salvation.

  The religious yearning of “Word on a Wing” was embodied in a gold cross that Bowie was given by his then manager Michael Lippman during the Station to Station sessions. “He also asked to have a mezuzah up in his room,” Lippman recalled, referring to the scriptural parchment that orthodox Jews often wear around their neck, or fix to a doorpost, “because of his revival and belief in religion, and because he felt that it would create more security for himself.” Bowie admitted in 1977 that “I’d been pretty godless for a few years. [My faith] became part of a new positive frame of mine that I have about trying to re-establish my own identity for myself—for my own sanity. . . . It’s part of coming down from the high mountain of fabrication.”

  Bowie was hardly alone among his generation in searching for a credible sense of self amid the consolations of religion. The seventies was an era of spiritual hope and also self-deception, in which those who had lost faith in the political and social certainties of the sixties reached out for the comfort of a more arcane belief system. Besides the tiny Church of Satan in California, former hippies were attracted by ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, financially supported by ex-Beatle George Harrison but thrown into confusion in 1977 by the death of its leader, Swami Prabhupada. Harrison’s seventies songs were rich in Krishna terminology, alongside concepts he had learned from another former guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Maharishi’s brand of transcendental meditation famously won over the Beatles and the Beach Boys in 1967; within five years, he had launched a Meditation University in Iowa, and formulated a World Plan to carry his philosophy around the world.

  Equally ambitious was the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who formed the Unification Church (colloquially known as the Moonies) in 1954, and who brought it to America in 1972, from where he sent missionaries around the world. So too did the young guru Maharaj Gi, who declared his leadership of the Divine Light Mission at the age of eight, after his father’s death. He staged a heavily hyped spiritual gathering in the enormous Houston Astrodome in 1973, before scandal eroded his church’s reputation.

  While attendance at traditional Anglican services dipped, more contemporary Christian sects began to flourish during the seventies, promoting the so-called Jesus revolution. Among them were the Jesus Movement, the Jesus Army, and, more controversial, the Children of God. This l
ast group adopted as many identities as Bowie across the decade, among them Teens for Christ, Revolutionaries for Jesus, and the Jesus Children (referenced in a Stevie Wonder song). Wonder wasn’t the only musician intrigued by their message: Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer abandoned his career to follow the sect in 1971. For a year or two the Children of God infiltrated the last bastions of the counterculture with their orange Jesus stickers and Jesus comics. Then their avowedly celibate leader was found to have taken a second wife and also sampled the delights of other members’ wives. By 1978 he was encouraging young women known as God’s Whores to practice Flirty Fishing, using their charms to entice gullible young men to join the cause. More conventionally minded members of the Children of God had already broken away to form the less scandalous Family of Love.

  While Jehovah’s Witnesses vainly awaited the end of the world, apparently scheduled for 1975, other groupings watched for flying saucers to arrive and carry the faithful few to heaven on another planet. The Scientologists followed an equally mysterious doctrine, written by science fiction novelist L. Ron Hubbard, whose first novel (Slan) assumed the imminent arrival of his own brand of Homo superior, “a new race of supermen” who represented “the next evolutionary step.” Bowie might have recognized the all-pervasive influence of Friedrich Nietzsche. Of all the religions and cults active in the seventies, however, none might have amused or appalled Bowie more than the Church of All Worlds, which based its philosophy on another sci-fi novel: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. What Bowie called “the high mountain of fabrication” stood tall and proud throughout this decade.

  [129] TVC15

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1975; Station to Station LP

  * * *

  Few (vinyl) sides in Bowie’s catalogue could rival the willful eclecticism of the second half of Station to Station. It was as if he had thrown the entire postwar history of popular music into a bag, and juxtaposed elements at random—the aural equivalent of the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique, perhaps. “TVC15” exemplified that method in miniature, deploying a distinct sound picture for each section of the song. What opened like a New Orleans piano twelve-bar blues from the early fifties (a blend between Huey Smith’s “Rockin’ Pneumonia” and Professor Longhair’s “Hey Now Baby,” seasoned with the Climax Blues Band’s recently released “Loosen Up”) was soon deluged with two layers of echoed guitar, a synthesized siren, and a saxophone burping as if it wanted to become a tuba. Amid that joyous collision of sound, Bowie* reeled off a nonsense tale of a carnivorous television—Attack of the Killer TV, if it had been a 1953 B-movie, perhaps. The idea was a joke, of course, but it chimed with the counterculture’s distrust of the media and consumer culture: the situation lamented by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, whereby “people [only] recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”

  While the New Orleans piano provided continuity, the song mutated into a two-word interlude (“transition/transmission”) that hinted at significance but was simply an evocative use of wordplay. And then there was a deliciously playful chorus, in the tradition of the Beach Boys’ Smile project, augmented with handclaps, guitars pretending that they were cellos, and a saxophone in a world of its own, while more and more Bowies were added to the mix. By the end, all these elements seemed to be locked into a pattern, as if machines had taken over a discotheque.

  [130] STAY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September–November 1975; Station to Station LP

  * * *

  This was a song about misunderstanding and indecision, clouded by chemical influence. “That was recorded very much in our cocaine frenzy,” Carlos Alomar told Bowie biographer David Buckley. Yet it was performed with utter conviction and a staggering command of dynamics. There was effortless self-confidence in the way that Earl Slick’s four-bar guitar riff was able to pause twice for two whole beats, to let the echo resound across the speakers. Gradually, the other instruments entered: the thud of kick drum and bass guitar; synth strings and percussion; another howling guitar from Slick, answered by more gentle motifs from Carlos Alomar—each provoking a subtle rearrangement of the rhythm, until the band had settled into a jerky, almost mechanical, ritual of funk. (The slow buildup of sound harked back to cinematic soul epics such as the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” three years earlier.) Slick carried the uniform shape of a ninth chord up and down the fretboard for the verse, before dropping out and letting Dennis Davis’s drums shoot adrenaline through Bowie’s ennui. After drifting through the verses in double-tracked unison, Bowie’s voice broke into two parts for the chorus, restrained in the lower register, almost histrionic an octave higher. And then the band was set free, with layers of guitars piled up beneath Slick’s solo, each offering a subtly different variant on the main theme.

  [131] WILD IS THE WIND

  (Tiomkin/Washington)

  Recorded September–November 1975; Station to Station LP

  * * *

  Such was the power of Bowie’s international following by 1976 that he was able to indulge himself with material that would have crippled his career a decade earlier. Certainly, Bowie’s audience would have been unlikely to remember this theme song from a 1957 movie melodrama, sung by Johnny Mathis* with schmaltzy reverence. Unlike him, they might also have been unfamiliar with Nina Simone’s reinvention of the song as an eerily placid investigation of romantic hypnosis. It appeared on her 1959 LP At Town Hall; then again (in a more extended live rendition from 1964) as the title track of a 1966 album. It was the latter that Bowie adopted as his template, rendering a precise imitation of many of Simone’s mannerisms and choices of phrasing, before allowing himself off the emotional leash and up to an ecstatic high B in the finale.

  Without stretching his persona in the slightest, it was easy for Bowie to prey on the more ethereal elements of Simone’s performance and extend them into a gothic display of quite deliberate affectation. His voice progressed from almost total detachment through an extravagant display of quivering vibrato to the verge of hysterical despair, all without losing control for a second. At the end of an album in which sonic distortion was the norm, there was something unsettling about an arrangement built around gentle strokes from Carlos Alomar’s electric guitar, with only the occasional knocking of woodblocks to disturb the mood. When drummer Dennis Davis finally provided emotional release with a four-bar gallop around his kit, topped with an orgiastic cymbal crash, the intrusion was almost shocking.

  STATION TO STATION LP

  I really, honestly and truly, don’t know how much longer my albums will sell,” Bowie admitted a few weeks after signing his severance agreement with Tony Defries. “I think they’re going to get more diversified, more extreme and radical right along with my writing. And I really don’t give a shit.” It would have been understandable if Bowie had reacted to the demands of his settlement by vowing not to record until it expired in 1982; or perhaps set himself to create the most uncommercial material imaginable, to ensure that Defries would effectively be earning 16 percent of nothing from his work. Instead he was able to make music that was totally uncompromising, utterly unlike anything he had recorded to date, and yet unexpectedly commercial. Indeed, Station to Station charted higher (No. 3) on the US album charts than any of his previous work: in those terms, at least, it remains the most successful album of his career in North America.

  In subsequent decades, Bowie would declare himself unable to recall the creation of the album: “I have serious problems about that year or two. I can’t remember how I felt.” His memory of the subsequent tour survived until 1980, at least, when he declared: “I was out of my mind totally, completely crazed.” It was, he summarized in 1997, “a miserable time to live through,” promoting an album that he now heard “as a piece of work by an entirely different person.” Yet as the re
cord appeared, he visualized it in similar terms to those he’d applied to Young Americans a year earlier: “Station to Station is probably the first album where I’ve got down to what I really think.” In which case, his mind was a mess of spiritual contradictions, defiant bombast, and unashamed romanticism.

  The other participants in the creative process remembered Station to Station in terms that were almost symbolic of the seventies Bowie: he arrived with melodic fragments and vague concepts instead of finished songs, then constantly changed what he had recorded, rewriting lyrics even when tracks were supposedly complete. Yet unlike albums such as Lodger and Scary Monsters, where the fragmentary nature of the compositions was allowed to stand, Bowie succeeded on this record in unifying and focusing his vision for each song, just as he had (in a very different milieu) on Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust.

  As evidence that, no matter how scattered his brain cells by emotional dislocation and chemical imbalance, he could still persuade them to work at some level of coordination, his 1976 world tour translated that focus into performances of almost mesmeric intensity. He claimed that he was only performing for the money: “This time I’m going to make some. I think I deserve it, don’t you?” But there was clearly a more personal agenda in play, or else he would not have challenged his audience so directly. Beyond his diehard fans, he was now filling large arenas—the venues he’d left half empty in 1972 and 1974—in the expectation of an evening of hedonistic rock/disco music in the vein of his most recent hits, “Fame” [125] and “Golden Years” [127]. Instead, as he had done with the sound collage that preceded the Diamond Dogs concerts in 1974, Bowie consciously challenged the audience’s desires. First, the crowds had to listen to an extensive portion of Kraftwerk’s catalogue before the show began—not with a radio anthem but with a screening of Dalí and Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou. Notoriously, the film includes a scene in which an eyeball is cut open with a razor; it was greeted in some American venues with laughter, and in others by outrage so vocal that, on at least one occasion, Bowie had to abandon the screening and hastily take to the stage. Bowie’s experimentation didn’t end with the visual non sequiturs and unsettling imagery of the surrealists; his performance was staged under extreme white lighting* in honor of the way in which Bertolt Brecht’s plays were presented by the Staatstheater in Berlin during the late 1920s. Surrealism on film; expressionist lighting: Bowie explained that “I’m trying to get over the idea of the European movement” (or canon). Or, as he reflected in 1989, there were “a bunch of lights, but we didn’t do anything. I walked about rather haughtily.” He sang and spoke haughtily, as well, with consequences that would soon become apparent.