David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  Bowie was quite capable of camping up his “weirdness” when it suited him. And yet if only a quarter of the stories circulating about him from this time are true—of his keeping his urine in the fridge, of black magic altars in the living room, of professional exorcisms of his swimming pool and so on—this would still be a man with serious mental health issues, to say the least. On top of his cocaine addiction and related delusions, Bowie was also physically cut off from any kind of “normal” existence. Life at Doheny Drive, where he’d taken up residence, resembled a kind of court, peopled with musicians, dealers, lovers, and a whole host of parasitic shysters and hangers-on. His assistant Corinne “Coco” Schwab acted as a gatekeeper, sorting out the logistics of his life, insulating him from situations and people that upset him. His ability to do anything for himself had become severely restrained. Fame, cocaine, isolation and Los Angeles (“the least suitable place on earth for a person to go in search of identity and stability,” as he’d put it later) had all conspired to spin Bowie off into a very dark place indeed.

  Given this state of affairs, the wonder is that Bowie got anything done in the studio at all. And, in fact, by Station to Station there’s very much a sense of the artist as well as the man in crisis. It had been a year since the Young Americans sessions, and he’d done very little recording since then. In May 1975 he’d taken his friend Iggy Pop in to record some material, but the session had quickly become chaotic, with Pop and Bowie even coming to blows at one stage. This was at the height of his “stick insect paranoia look,” according to guitarist James Williamson, who’d found Bowie slumped at the control booth, enveloped in a hideous wall of distorted noise.

  For Station to Station, Bowie went into the studio with only two songs, both of which were eventually changed beyond recognition. He was accustomed to working extremely quickly—the bulk of Ziggy Stardust, for instance, was done in a two-week period, itself coming only weeks after the recording of Hunky Dory. By contrast, the Station to Station sessions stretched out over two and a half months, yielding just five original compositions and a histrionic cover version of “Wild Is the Wind.”

  “You retain a superficial hold on reality so that you can get through the things that you know are absolutely necessary for your survival,” Bowie mused in 1993. “But when that starts to break up, which inevitably it does—around late 1975 everything was starting to break up—I would work at songs for hours and hours and days and days and then realise after a few days that I had done absolutely nothing. I thought I’d been working and working, but I’d only been rewriting the first four bars or something. And I hadn’t got anywhere. I couldn’t believe it! I’d been working on it for a week! I hadn’t got past four bars! And I’d realise that I’d been changing those four bars around, doing them backwards, splitting them up and doing the end first. An obsession with detail had taken over.” It was yet another consequence of the psychosis, and that eerie, overwrought quality is all over Station to Station. It’s the cocaine album par excellence, in its slow, hypnotic rhythms, its deranged romantic themes, its glacial alienation, its dialogue with God (“Word on a Wing”), in the pure white lines of the album cover, in the hi-fi sheen that’s clean enough to snort off.

  But to get back to the title track. As the occult incantations of the first section end, the distorted train sounds make a brief return, and then comes a bridge at 5:17. The song abruptly switches tempo to a Neu!-like motorik chug; the instrumentation simplifies; and new melody lines break in, almost as if it were another song entirely—as it probably was originally (not a lot of detail is known about these sessions, due to the cocaine habits and memory holes of just about everyone involved). Now we’re looking back to some kind of lost idyll, a time when “there were mountains and mountains and sunbirds to soar with, and once I could never be down.” It’s here that the restless, questing theme makes its appearance—“got to keep searching and searching and what will I be believing and who will connect me with love?”

  A final section kicks in at 6:03, the rhythm changing yet again to disco-inflected beats, with rock guitar and piano hurtling along on top. “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine,” Bowie now delusionally meditates. “I’m thinking that it must be love.” It’s as if the narrator is so alienated that he’s come out the other side, into something approaching passion (the title, Bowie has said, refers to the Stations of the Cross). And now a new incantation repeats itself to fade: “It’s too late to be grateful, it’s too late to be late again/It’s too late to be hateful, the European canon is here.” “It was like a plea to come back to Europe,” Bowie commented a few years later. “It was one of those self-chat things one has with oneself from time to time.”

  That last lyric points to what the track achieved sonically. The train has travelled from occult-tinged, post-Manson Los Angeles towards a certain modernist Europe and its avant-garde pretensions, its experimental song structures, its fascination with sound as texture. A Europe where traditional popular music (British music hall, French chanson, German cabaret) had always privileged exaggeration and role-playing over authenticity and self-expression. “Towards the end of my stay in America,” Bowie has said, “I realised that what I had to do was to experiment. To discover new forms of writing. To evolve, in fact, a new musical language. That’s what I set out to do. That’s why I returned to Europe.” The Rimbaud-esque desire to create a new language is perhaps the upside of the messianism. There’s an irony in his inversion of the order of things: the conventional spiritual journey is from the Old World to the New, striking out for fresh horizons and frontiers. It’s the troubled aesthetes—Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound—who make the reverse trip.

  This struggle towards Europe (along with the schizophrenic flavour of the two albums) is what connects Station to Station to its successor Low. The link is further underlined by the album cover, a still from Bowie’s first (and by a long chalk his best) movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth, which Bowie worked on directly prior to the Station to Station sessions. It shows him as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton entering his spaceship (in reality an anechoic chamber). The current reissue of the album has a full-length colour image, but on the original release it was cropped and black and white, giving it an austere, expressionist flavour redolent of the European modernism of the 1920s and the photography of Man Ray. The stark, red sans sérif typography—the album title and artist are run together (STATIONTOSTATIONDAVIDBOWIE)—adds to the retro-modernist feel. Bowie himself hovers somewhere between America and Europe, his hair in a James Dean quiff, his tieless white shirt severely buttoned to the neck. The cover of Low, too, is a treated still from The Man Who Fell to Earth.

  the visitor

  In December 1975, shortly after he’d signed off on Station to Station, Bowie was back at work on a soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth—although ultimately it wasn’t used in the film, and remains to this day unreleased. If Station to Station laid down the artistic groundwork for Low, its actual genesis came in these soundtrack sessions. Various Low tracks are reported to have been recycled from this time—Brian Eno has said that “Weeping Wall” started life there, although Bowie himself claims that “the only hold-over from the proposed soundtrack that I actually used was the reverse bass part in ‘Subterraneans.’” He is perhaps not the most reliable witness to the lost weekend of 1975 (Bowie on Station to Station: “I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was”), but other hold-over candidates do seem to me to be ruled out on internal evidence.

  Bowie worked with Paul Buckmaster (producer of his 1969 “Space Oddity” hit), who brought in a cello to accompany Bowie’s guitar, synthesisers and drum machines. The sessions (at Bowie’s Bel Air home) produced five or six working tracks, recorded on a TEAC four-track tape recorder. According to Buckmaster, the two were very taken at the time with Kraftwerk’s recently released Radio-Activity. This album caught Kraftwerk at a transitional phase of their career, channelling free-form experimentalism towards more tightly controlled, rob
otic rhythms that are like the sonic equivalent of a Mondrian painting. Radio-Activity is a clear influence on Low, with its mix of pop hooks, unsettling sound effects, retro-modernism; its introspection and emotional flatness. The theremin-sounding synths of “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and the electronic interludes on “A New Career in a New Town” in particular have a RadioActivity feel to them.

  Apart from that early run-through of “Subterraneans,” then, these sessions’ real contribution to Low was that they got Bowie thinking about (and creating) atmospheric, “mood” music for the first time. In a career of over a decade, Bowie had yet to record a single instrumental piece. In this respect, the loghorrea of Station to Station— with its lumber room of loosely connected images—looks backwards rather than forwards, since more than half the tracks on Low ended up lyric-less, and the others are pretty monosyllabic. Until Low, Bowie had tended to follow some sort of narrative line, however elusive. On Low, even on the songs with lyrics, that narrative impulse largely falls away. And it was during the Man Who Fell to Earth sessions that, he later said, he first got the idea of hooking up with Brian Eno at some point.

  There are conflicting accounts as to why the soundtrack project was abandoned. According to Bowie, his manager, Michael Lippman, had promised to secure him the rights to score the film and he’d started recording on that basis. When later told that his work would be competing in a three-way pitch, he withdrew from the process in a fury. That account doesn’t quite square with those of others involved. According to Harry Maslin, who co-produced Station to Station, Bowie was by this stage so burned out that he couldn’t focus on the work properly. Buckmaster seems to agree, recalling one session where Bowie had practically overdosed and had to be helped out of the studio. “I considered the music to be demo-ish and not final, although we were supposed to be making it final,” Buckmaster told Bowie biographer David Buckley. “All we produced was something that was substandard, and [the film’s director] Nic Roeg turned it down on those grounds.”

  John Phillips, who ended up doing the soundtrack, tells yet a different story: “Roeg wanted banjos and folk music and Americana for the film, which was about an alien who drops from the sky into the southwest. ‘David really can’t do that kind of thing,’ Roeg said.” This seems to me a better explanation for the rejection of the Bowie soundtrack—The Man Who Fell to Earth has a sci-fi premise but isn’t really a scifi film and a spacey, futuristic soundtrack would have set the wrong tone. As for the quality of Bowie’s work, those who did hear it were impressed. Phillips found it “haunting and beautiful, with chimes, Japanese bells, and what sounded like electronic wind and waves.” Bowie had the soundtrack with him during the Low sessions for work on “Subterraneans,” and at one stage played it to the musicians: “It was excellent,” recalled guitarist Ricky Gardiner, “quite unlike anything else he’s done.” Months later, Bowie sent Roeg a copy of Low, with a note that said: “This is what I wanted to do for the soundtrack.”

  The Man Who Fell to Earth was English filmmaker Nic Roeg’s fourth movie. In the prime of his career in the mid-seventies, he’d received widespread acclaim for arthouse classics such as Walkabout and Don’t Look Now. And he’d already initiated one rock star (Mick Jagger) into the world of acting, on his directorial debut Performance. But for Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth turned out to be more than just his first major acting job. In many respects, Thomas Jerome Newton, the part he plays, was Nic Roeg’s projection of Bowie, and Bowie, in turn, confessed to “being Newton for six months” after the movie shoot, wearing Newton’s clothes and striking his poses. (“I’d been offered a couple of scripts but I chose this one because it was the only one where I didn’t have to sing or look like David Bowie,” he said at the time. “Now I think that David Bowie looks like Newton.”) Roeg had first wanted Peter O’Toole for the role but became interested in Bowie after seeing a documentary that Alan Yentob had made for the BBC arts programme Omnibus. It was entitled Cracked Actor, and caught a pale, stick-thin Bowie as he toured America. It impressed Roeg greatly, to the extent that a scene in which Bowie is having some sort of psychotic episode in the back of a limo in New York was re-created for the movie, with the same chauffeur and even snatches of the dialogue reprised. Other self-referential moments make clear the link between Bowie and the role he’s playing. Like Bowie, Newton creates music, and near the end of the film, he makes an album of spectral sounds entitled The Visitor. The scene in which a character buys this album shows a record store display promoting Bowie’s Young Americans in the background. An early screenplay apparently used Bowie lyrics as well.

  The movie is about an alien who travels to Earth from a drought-stricken planet, where he has left a wife and child. Using his superior knowledge, he starts up a high-tech corporation to earn the money he needs to build a spaceship, which would ship water to save his planet. Into his reclusive life comes Mary-Lou, an elevator operator, who introduces Newton to TV and alcohol. Meanwhile, his phenomenal rise to power sparks interest from government agents, who find out about his space project and determine to stop it. They imprison Newton in a penthouse and subject him to medical examinations. Eventually they lose interest in him; Mary-Lou tracks him down and he escapes. He records The Visitor, which he hopes his wife, who may already be dead, will hear. Knowing he can neither go back home nor save his dying family, Newton descends into self-pity and alcohol. In a sense, he has become human.

  Bowie is not called upon to act in any conventional sense (and when he occasionally has to, the results are fairly lame). He merely projects an otherworldliness that’s already there in the alienation that’s the result of rock star fame, drug abuse and a romantic conception of the creative life. “The basic premise is of a man forced to be in a position where he has to enter a society, not letting too much be known because then he’d be in continual isolation,” explains Nic Roeg. “It had to be a secret self, a secret person. Emotionally, I think a lot of these thoughts appealed to David.” Newton is like a refugee, “an astronaut of inner space rather than outer space. I remember David and I talking about that theme.”

  The second, “ambient” side of Low is partly about exploring Newton’s vast interior landscapes, as Bowie’s note to Roeg implies. The fact that two of Bowie’s albums and numerous singles bear images from the film illustrate its importance. The role was a perfect feint for the Bowie persona, crystallising the metaphor of the alien, which Bowie continued to both nurture and fight against (his uninspiring “regular guy” schtick of the 1980s was something of a reaction to it). As late as 1997, the chosen title of his album Earthling resonates with an irony that goes back to The Man Who Fell to Earth.

  one magical movement

  Station to Station was released in late January 1976. If it didn’t do quite as well as its predecessor, Young Americans, it was still very much a commercial as well as a critical success, spending several weeks at the top of the charts and yielding a top ten single on both sides of the Atlantic (“Golden Years”).

  Following its release, Bowie decided (or was persuaded) to tour the album across the States, and then Europe. His previous foray into the concert halls had resulted in something of an overblown prog rock absurdity, with an elaborate, hugely expensive set. For the new tour, Bowie wanted something far simpler, if no less theatrical. The only real prop would be vast banks of harsh white light, creating a sort of Brechtian distance, and continuing the artistic journey back to Europe: “I wanted to go back to a kind of Expressionist German film look,” Bowie has said. “A feeling of a Berlinesque performer—black waistcoat, black trousers, white shirt, and the lighting of, say, Fritz Lang, or Pabst. A black-and-white-movies look, but with an intensity that was sort of aggressive. I think for me, personally, theatrically, that was the most successful tour I’ve ever done.” In the dramatic play of white light and shadow, others saw more than a hint of Nuremberg as well—an impression not discouraged by Bowie’s provocative pronunciations on fascism during this period.

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bsp; All in all, it was a distinctly arty affair. The show opened with a projection of Luis Buñuel’s 1920s surrealist classic, Le Chien Andalou—the one with the excruciating eyeball-slicing sequence—which was accompanied by tracks from Kraftwerk’s equally arty, equally un-rock Radio-Activity album. (Bowie had invited Kraftwerk to open for him, but they’d declined the offer, or perhaps hadn’t even responded to it.) Bowie himself performed dressed in the style of a dissolute pre-war aristocrat. He was playing the role of the thin white duke referenced on Station to Station’s title track—“a very nasty character indeed,” Bowie admitted later. The thin white duke was less sketched-out than other characters Bowie had inhabited; he was a chilly, Aryan elitist with Nietzchean overtones, and the morbid self-absorption of a nineteenth-century German romantic.

  It was a formidable piece of expressionist theatre that received adulatory reviews. And yet, in the midst of this artistic success, and despite the iron self-discipline needed to formulate it and carry it off, Bowie actually seemed to be as deranged as ever. In Stockholm he regaled a journalist with the script he was writing about Goebbels, and the land he was going to buy to start up his own country. The messianic delusions had hardly abated; quite the contrary: “As I see it I am the only alternative for the premier in England. I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.” Bowie later passed this off as provocation, which it obviously was, although the line between delusion and provocation had by then become gossamer-thin.