The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [141] ART DECADE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded October–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  Bowie explained the pun in the title as a comment on the sterility of the art scene in late seventies West Berlin, isolated from the outside world. In fact, Berlin had been undergoing an artistic renaissance since the late sixties, with communes being formed in warehouses and lofts. By 1977 a group known as the Junge (or Neue) Wilde were consciously rekindling the fire of the expressionist movement. They opened the Galerie am Moritzplatz a few weeks after Low was released to showcase this eruption of creativity.

  “Art Decade” was based around a gorgeously melancholy chord progression similar to Brian Wilson’s instrumental title track from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album. Around this theme—carried forward, under Eno’s supervision, on cello, synthesized strings, vibes, and treated guitar—emerged the sounds of abstraction: some evoking visual impressions, such as the toy orchestra slowly awakening in the opening bars; others were more fleeting and imprecise. Each repetition began in Eb and then modulated graciously down and then up the twelve-tone scale to arrive at a natural E, where the “strings” remained while other textures swayed back and forth between E and F#. The finished piece reinforced the opinion of Peter Baumann, from the German ambient band Tangerine Dream, that “no other instrument can get such a warm sound as some synthesizers. But it’s a new, different kind of warmth and intimacy.”

  [142] WEEPING WALL

  (Bowie)

  Recorded October–November 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  The minimalist composer Steve Reich built several of his most significant sixties and seventies pieces around the raindrops-on-a-river impressions created by melodic percussive instruments such as the marimba, vibes, and the xylophone. In his most overt evocation of Reich’s work* since “Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family” [104], Bowie replicated this effect with koto, xylophone, and synthesizer. But whereas Reich would have been content to focus attention on his subtle variations of pattern, Bowie used his innovation as a backdrop to an unsettling blend of synthesized strings, a chorale of real and artificial voices, and a howling guitar that pulled naggingly at the melody of the traditional folk song “Scarborough Fair.” If the strings and voices represented order, then the guitar was a representation of anarchy, constantly trying to break free before being dragged back. Gradually, a mass of computerized voices—Bowie’s among them—rose to the surface, as if echoing the guitar’s struggle, before it too fell to earth. Whether the weeping wall of the title was in its traditional location of Jerusalem, or (as Bowie hinted) in Berlin, the sense of imprisonment and frustrated energy was palpable.

  BERLIN

  Bowie’s first visit to West Berlin was in October 1969, in the company of Kenneth Pitt. He saw the infamous wall that enclosed the “free” sectors of the city and caught a voyeur’s glimpse of the nightlife portrayed in the musical Cabaret. The night after he returned to London, he and Angie watched a BBC-TV documentary about Christopher Isherwood, the author of the thirties stories on which Cabaret was based. Angie would later declare Isherwood her favorite writer; Bowie was equally entranced, his enjoyment of Goodbye to Berlin enhanced by the uneasy decadence he had witnessed with his own eyes. He returned briefly in 1973, and again in 1976, before deciding after his concert at the city’s Deutschlandhalle that this should become his refuge from the chilling liberation of Los Angeles. “I have to put myself in those situations to produce any reasonably good writing,” he insisted later, “forcing myself to live according to the restrictions of that city.”

  The city that one commentator dubbed “the twentieth century’s dystopia: a city of expressionistic anguish” had, by the mid-seventies, become “unsettlingly foreign, a place where alien cultures and customs were evident at every turn.” Bowie spent much of his leisure time in Kreuzberg, a milieu of aliens (economic migrants from Turkey, laborers from Africa and Asia who had been expelled when the East no longer required their services), and artists; punks and radicals; drugs and prostitution. It was an ideal venue for a man who wanted to feel a hint of danger and did not wish to travel far for his kicks. Addicts and teenage whores gravitated toward the Zoo Station, inspiring an early eighties movie (Christiane F), for which Bowie provided the soundtrack. The modern expressionist painters exhibited at their newly opened gallery and filled the cafés and gay bars with radical chatter: Bowie soon crossed paths with their most prominent figure, Salome, an artist and punk musician. Among the paintings he was displaying during Bowie’s residence in Berlin was his Fuck series of canvases, which might have been designed to appeal to the singer: they featured naked, masked balloon creatures in homosexual poses, against vivid, bloodred sheets.

  Red was the color of another group of extremists adrift in West Germany: the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF/Red Army Faction, commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group). This was an anticapitalist terrorist cell, determined to exile American influence from West Germany, bring down former Nazis who still occupied positions of privilege, and pledge solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world, especially the Palestine liberation movement. Its roots lay in the late sixties protests of students and other activists, met with violence by police in West Berlin. Founder member Gudrun Ensslin declared: “This fascist state means to kill us all. . . . This is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them.” Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and others were arrested, and either escaped from prison or went on the run before they could be sentenced. Their crusade was joined by groups of mental health patients who, like the radical psychiatrists of Britain, believed that the repressive state was the cause of their inability to exist within the system; unlike their UK counterparts, they took up arms alongside the Red Army Faction.

  Bowie’s time in Berlin saw the battle between terrorists and the state reach a bloody climax known as the Deutscher Herbst (German autumn), which involved the kidnapping and killing of a prominent German industrialist; the hijacking in Majorca of a Lufthansa jet, the pilot of which was killed (alongside three of the hijackers); and the suicide* in their cells of all the leading RAF figures. At the same time, violence framed the city from another direction, as the East German government built its third and most impregnable wall around West Berlin, sparking another bout of suicides among the effectively imprisoned residents. Doctors diagnosed a widespread epidemic of Mauerkrankheit (or wall sickness). Every few months, meanwhile, an inhabitant of the east would attempt to scale the wall and fall victim to the mines that littered the border area.

  Little wonder, then, that Bowie recalled later that West Berlin was “an ambiguous place,” where it was hard “to distinguish between the ghosts and the living.” It was, he said, the city that foretold the future of Europe, and, more oppressively, “a macrocosm of my own state of mind”: an isolated outpost amid a sea of oppression, perhaps. Yet it was here that he was able to complete two records, plan a third, and regain the sense of identity that he had virtually destroyed in Los Angeles. The Bowie who left Berlin for New York in 1979 was physically, mentally, and morally almost unrecognizable as the haunted, addicted figure who had arrived there three years earlier.

  [143] SUBTERRANEANS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1975 and September 1976; Low LP

  * * *

  Soon after the Low sessions had finished, Brian Eno revealed the methodology behind “Warszawa” [140] and “Subterraneans”: “Instead of having a lot of singing and an instrumental, there’s a lot of instrumental and a tiny bit of singing . . . it’s not words: it’s phonetics. It’s not lyrics, you see. He’s just using very nice-sounding words that aren’t actually* in any language.” Eno also hinted that “Subterraneans” had been retrieved from Bowie’s abortive attempt to supply soundtrack music for The Man Who Fell to Earth. Bowie had previously promised that the film soundtrack would feature electronic music “without vocals that you’d recognise.” The track’s title was a nod t
o Jack Kerouac, Bowie’s favorite author as a teenager, whose novel The Subterraneans recounted an affair with an African-American woman (a subject with which Bowie enjoyed some familiarity). More substantial was the clue provided by the music itself, and in particular Bowie’s superb multidubbed vocals: he must surely have been familiarizing himself with the polyphonic writing of plainsong composers, as his lines were harmonized as if they derived from some long-suppressed setting of the Catholic Mass.

  The haunting quality of “Subterraneans” (and, again, “Warszawa”) makes one regret that Bowie and Eno did not dare to create an entire album in this idiom. Even for an iconoclastic rock star, however, this might have been a risk too far. Instead we can cherish the still beauty of this piece, with its delicate textures of vibraphone, synthesized strings, and echoed guitar, interrupted by an ominous bass guitar ascent that constantly threatened to stop short of resolution, but finally provided the F# note that the ear demanded. Subtle flickers of backward guitar rekindled memories of rock’s sonic experiments of 1966 by the Beatles and the Byrds—incongruous, in theory, for a piece so imbued with spirituality, but somehow perfect in context. Likewise Bowie’s remarkable saxophone solo, his most elegant and directly emotional playing on any record, always opting for “feel” rather than technical perfection.

  Yet the album still had two last tricks to play. More than five minutes into the track, a strange croaking sound—like a grumbling bullfrog—could be heard beneath the chorale, debunking the spirituality of the piece. A few seconds later, “Subterraneans” ended—not with comforting resolution, but with a hanging D from Bowie’s voices, midway through that tantalizing rise executed throughout by the bass guitar. It was completion and incompletion in the same moment: as unsettling, in its way, as the psychological dramas that this track seemed to have overcome.

  LOW LP

  Brian Eno promised that Low would combine elements of “recognisable Bowie” with “the most exciting new concept” he’d come across in years. In retrospect, the format of the album—one side recognizable as “rock,” albeit hardly old-school; the other more ambient—came to appear almost inevitable, especially in the wake of a similar division of styles on “Heroes.” But in January 1977, when only the most dogged of Krautrock aficionados had tracked down an import copy of NEU! ’75, which operated on similar principles, Low was regarded as revolutionary. Like Station to Station before it, the album established Bowie as a recording artist whom it was impossible to second-guess. There seemed to be no obvious way of tracking his progression from Hunky Dory to Low in almost exactly five years: even now his willingness to risk losing his audience, and his reputation (many critics reacted badly to Low’s apparent lethargy), appears courageous.

  His psychological turmoil aside, the crucial influences on Low were taken to be Brian Eno’s resistance to traditional rock structures and sounds, and the mechanized, repetitive approach of much Krautrock. Twenty-five years later, Bowie reflected that the German influence had been overemphasized: “It’s still a very organic, blues-driven sound . . . the actual rhythm section is not a metronome, electronic sound like the Germans were doing.” Indeed, what distinguished Low and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot was precisely that amalgam of the darkest and most enticing elements of American and German musical cultures: the robotic, the escapist, the ethereal, the direct, all conveying a state of emotional dissonance, in which depression could be uplifting and boredom became transcendent.

  [144] SOME ARE

  (Bowie/Eno)

  [145] ABDULMAJID

  (Bowie)

  [146] ALL SAINTS

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded September–November 1976; Low extended CD [144/146]; “Heroes” extended CD [145]

  * * *

  Bowie’s experiments with instrumental textures during the late seventies operated within a different sense of time than his “rock”-oriented material of the same era. His songs on Low, “Heroes,” Lodger, and Scary Monsters may have represented a decisive break from what had gone before but they continued to demonstrate his subconscious desire for movement and progression in his career. Lyrically and musically, each set of recordings had a distinctive collective identity: they were recognizably the work of the same artist, but under the influence of different concepts and motives.

  His instrumental work, with and without Brian Eno, was much more integrated—or, if you like, unadventurous. Bowie’s giant leap was envisaging himself as an artist who could make music without words: once he had escaped the conventional borders of rock and pop, he was able to relax and play, without the almost addictive desire to create new sounds and styles. So his more ambient work was much more difficult to locate within a definite time frame: there was no stylistic or technological gulf between his earliest experiments on Low and “Crystal Japan” [179], recorded three years later during the Scary Monsters sessions.

  “Some Are” and “All Saints” were first released on the CD reissue of Low; “Abdulmajid” (named, obviously after the event, for Bowie’s second wife, Iman) appeared on the “Heroes” CD. Officially remixed in 1991, they may also have been augmented or completed at that time, while some sources insist that “Some Are” actually predated the Eno collaboration, and was written during the soundtrack sessions for The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1975.

  “Some Are” differed from most of its contemporaries in having a set of lyrics (four lines of random images, emoted in a soft, intimate voice) and also a smooth texture that brought Bowie close to the troubled territory of New Age* music. Even at its least disturbing, however, Bowie’s music introduced a little grit to the smooth surface of voice and synthesizers, in the form of an expanding hubbub of noise. “Abdulmajid” followed a similar rise-and-fall melody to “Crystal Japan,” though in its 1991 presentation its gentle synthesizer tones were masked by a “trance” rhythm that was obviously added long after the original recording date. “All Saints” (its title borrowed from Kandinsky’s turbulent canvases of 1911) represented a collage of sounds rather than a simple melody, with guitar power chords and sustain suggesting the birth of a new genre, ambient R&B. Pleasant though all three compositions were, however, they added nothing substantial to Bowie’s European canon.

  ROCK ON THE TITANIC: Punk

  Neither Station to Station nor Low topped the British album charts. But the records that did achieve that status in 1976 and 1977 included greatest hits compilations by Perry Como, Roy Orbison, Slim Whitman, Abba, the Beach Boys, the Stylistics, Bert Weedon, Glen Campbell, the Shadows, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Connie Francis, Elvis Presley (in the aftermath of his death), the Supremes, Cliff Richard, and Bread. The US charts, from which these retrospective compilations were barred, were dominated by the soft rock of Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac. Neither were the singles charts any more exhilarating: 1976 was the era of disco, easy listening, and sing-along pop ditties that made the bubblegum hits of 1970 sound positively raw by comparison. You did not have to be desperate for anarchy to find the likes of the Captain and Tennille, Barry Manilow, or the Bellamy Brothers bland.

  Rock was now something to be experienced in the arenas that David Bowie filled during his 1976 tour. As the Who’s Pete Townshend recalled a decade later, “That rather camp and glossy show-business side of rock was something that the audience wanted. . . . The halls were getting bigger. So the staging had to be grander . . . and that did lead to theatrical pomposity.” By common consent, ticket prices were too expensive; rock stars were utterly distanced from their audiences, both in concert and in their everyday lives; the music of emotional and social liberation had become a form of alienation.

  In two wonderful think pieces in the New Musical Express, “Is Rock’n’Roll Ready for 1976?” (January 3, 1976) and “The Titanic Sails at Dawn” (June 19, 1976), writer Mick Farren teased out the implications of this perilous divide between audience and artists. “Is rock’n’roll on an unalterable course to a neo–Las Vegas?” he asked in his first article. “It sure looks like it.” Five mont
hs later, nothing had changed: “Has rock’n’roll become another mindless consumer product that plays footsie with jet set and royalty while the kids who make up its roots and energy queue up in the rain to watch it from 200 yards away? . . . It is time for the 70s generation to start producing their own ideas, and ease out the old farts who are still pushing tired ideas left over from the 60s.”

  Farren exempted Bowie (“the only figure who seems to have the least interest in the social progress of rock’n’roll”) from criticism. Perhaps he had read Bowie’s intuitive take on the inertia of modern pop culture, delivered to American journalist Lisa Robinson in February 1976: “To cause an art movement, you have to set something up and then destroy it . . . the only thing to do is what the Dadaists, the surrealists did: complete amateurs who are pretentious as hell and just fuck it up the ass. Cause as much bad, ill feeling as possible, and then you’ve got a chance of having a movement. But you’ll only create a movement when you have a rebellious cause, and you can’t have a rebellious cause when you’re the most well-loved person in the country.”