David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  afterlife

  A quick word on the afterlife of the album, before we move on to the last track. The mixing of Low was completed at Hansa-by-the-wall on November 16, 1976. Bowie’s record company, RCA, had initially intended to get it out for Christmas, but when they heard the finished product they were taken aback by its lack of commercial potential, and delayed release. One executive at RCA apparently said he would personally buy Bowie a house in Philadelphia so that he could write and record Young Americans II. Even Tony DeFries, a former manager with whom Bowie had long since parted company, but who retained a sales percentage, briefly returned to the scene. Visconti: “Tony DeFries suddenly arrived and still purported to be David’s manager. RCA complained that there weren’t enough vocals …David just looked at the small print of the contract which read that they had to put it out.” The album was eventually released in mid-January 1977, a week after Bowie’s thirtieth birthday. In the face of RCA’s reservations, and despite the fact that Bowie refused to be interviewed for its release or do any promotion, Low was still no kind of commercial failure, reaching number 2 in the UK charts and number 11 in the States.

  The record sleeve features a heavily treated still from The Man Who Fell to Earth, already used for a paperback reissue of the original Walter Travis novel, and designed by Bowie’s old school friend George Underwood. The Man Who Fell to Earth had by then come and gone in the movie theatres, so the sleeve choice wasn’t a question of promoting the film, and points to the connection Bowie made between film and album. Station to Station had already featured a still from the film—a modish black-and-white image of a sleekly dressed Thomas Jerome Newton stepping into his spaceship. The image on Low is quite different, with a blank-faced Bowie in mugshot profile (title and image combine to make the “low profile” pun), wearing a less than stylish English duffel-coat. The dominant colour is an autumnal orange. Bowie’s hair is exactly the same shade as the swirling, Turner-esque background, underlining the solipsistic notion of place reflecting person, object and subject melding into one.

  Bowie biographies tend to say that Low got bad press on release, which may be true in the States, but a glance at the UK music papers of the week of January 22, 1977, reveals reviews that are in general far more positive than negative, although critics were rather confounded by Bowie’s new direction. The reviews were filled with gloomy mid-seventies sociological riffs that bear no great relevance to Low, but nonetheless reflect the album’s alienation. “Conceptually we are picking up where Station to Station left off: the western world’s enslavement to time and consequent devaluation of place,” the NME informs us. “Low is the ONLY contemporary rock album,” and side two is “stunningly beautiful if you can get past taking it as some kind of personal insult.” Over at Sounds, Tim Lott declared that “Low is the most difficult piece of music Bowie has ever put his name to.” The listener has to work hard but “in the last word, it works, though on an unusual half-hidden level.” For Melody Maker, Low is “oddly the music of Now—not exactly currently popular, but what seems right for the times. Bowie is brilliant in his dissection of mass communication.”

  In any case, it wasn’t long after Low’s release before it was realised that the album was a milestone, both as an exemplary work in itself, and in the development of popular music. A whole strand of post-punk owes its existence to some sort of combination of the glam-era and Berlin-era Bowie personae; to Bowie’s and Eno’s injection of the synthetic into the three-minute pop song; to Visconti’s and Dennis Davis’s aggressive drum thrash; to the album’s funk/electronic hybrid; to the turn towards a European aesthetic; to the non-pop experimentalism of the second side; to Low’s appropriation of modernist alienation. Even as late as 2000, Radiohead was attempting certain similar things with Kid A (the instrumental track on that album, “Treefingers,” could almost have been on Low).

  Since its release, Low’s critical stock has kept rising, and the album, in one way or another, has continued to live its life and even further evolve. Bowie’s 1978 release Stage featured a number of live versions of Low songs; and the 1991 Ryko Low reissue included three extra tracks—a forgettable remix of “Sound and Vision” plus two outtakes from the original Low sessions, both credited to Bowie/Eno. “All Saints” is a plodding synthesiser instrumental that is interesting enough, but doesn’t really go anywhere and ultimately sounds derivative of German synth bands like Cluster. But “Some Are” is a gem: a fragile, atmospheric piece with wintry images, a faint ghostly choir in the background and strange half-organic noises, exuding the same sort of quietude as “Art Decade.” It could have happily sat somewhere on side two of the album; my guess is that it was dropped because its tolling piano intro is a little too similar to that of “Warszawa.” In 1992, Philip Glass premiered his Low symphony; and in 2002 Bowie performed Low in its entirety as part of his curatorship of London’s Meltdown Festival. Bowie’s albums are gradually being re-released in thirtieth-anniversary double-CD reissues with bonus tracks, so perhaps we can expect further Low material to be unearthed for 2007. (One recent biography refers to “dozens of bittersweet songs” recorded during the Low sessions but not released because Bowie wanted a harder sound. The unreleased The Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack might be another candidate, since Paul Buckmaster apparently still has the recordings on DAT in his archive.)

  homesick blues

  Low’s final track—and for me Low’s most moving moment —was also the first to be conceived, since it was built over a piece from those Man Who Fell to Earth sessions of late 1975. “Subterraneans” is ostensibly about “the people who got caught in East Berlin after the separation—hence the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was.” It’s a sombre, hermetic piece featuring a slow, five-note bass figure that repeats itself at intervals throughout the track. On top of this, Bowie layers on even slower synth lines and also disorientating backwards tape sounds—something he’d already used to good effect on the intro to “Sweet Thing” on Diamond Dogs, and would use again on “Move On” (Lodger). There is a melancholy wordless chant, and then at 3:09 comes a beautifully emotive saxophone line (a very Bowie-esque touch). It’s played by Bowie himself in the mournful Dorian mode, and has an improvised jazz feeling. There’s an ache to it that could indeed reflect the plight of East Berliners trapped behind the Wall, but is really just an abstraction of that universal sense of the sorrow of vanished things.

  With its film soundtrack genesis, the track could just as easily be the mindscape of Thomas Jerome Newton as he remembers a lost family and home in an alien world. Given the title, “Subterraneans” makes one think of a dark underworld, a civilisation forced underground in the aftermath of some great cataclysm. In fact, for me it recalls Chris Marker’s enigmatic short film La Jetée (1962). That film is “the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood,” and uses voice-over and expressionistic black-and-white still photography to evoke a subterranean world following nuclear catastrophe, exploring all those themes of memory, loss, dream, fate and the ever-present ghosts that “Subterraneans” also seems to evoke. (La Jetée later inspired the video for Bowie’s “Jump They Say,” the 1993 track he wrote about his schizophrenic half-brother, Terry.)

  At 3:51 (again well over halfway through the track—the words are so often late to the scene on this album), we get the nonsense lyric: “share bride failing star, care-line, care-line, care-line, care-line, briding me shelley, shelley umm” (or something to that effect). It’s half Kurt Schwitters, half Lewis Carroll. It doesn’t mean anything (unless failing star is a reference to The Man Who Fell to Earth), but is extraordinarily affecting nonetheless—as if Bowie is desperately scrabbling to interpret the final thoughts of some dying world before it’s too late. It is a more extreme breakdown of communication than the imaginary Eastern language of “Warszawa,” because there are English words in there that we recognise, but still it doesn’t cohere into anything grammatical or semantic. We’ve gone beyond that, to the point where the wor
ds are reconfigured into a completely private language, as the ultimate act of autism.

  Language—the deflection of it, the refusal of it, the stripping it of sense, the attempt to get past it—is a key concern of the album. The three-letter Low is already a radically minimal title, and the lyric sheet to Low has only 410 words, barely a paragraph’s worth (compared with well over 2,000 for Diamond Dogs). The refusal of language is also the refusal of narrative, another of Bowie’s preoccupations on Low: “Eno got me off narrative,” he said at the time. “Brian really opened my eyes to the idea of processing, to the abstract of the journey of the artist.” Telling stories was something that English popular music had always done, had continued to do into the pop era with the Beatles, the Kinks, the Stones, then on to Bowie, with his quasi-concept albums of the early seventies and the skewed vignettes of songs like “Panic in Detroit” or “Young Americans.” On the other hand, a lot of the German experimental music of the time had turned away from the narrative impulse, except maybe in an abstract structural sense. An album like Can’s Tago Mago does something similar to Low, with its funk experimentalism of the first half giving way to the disturbed inner space of the second half, where not only words but music itself is more or less jettisoned in favour of textural sound. Implicit in the rejection of narrative is the rejection of a certain Romantic tradition.

  crash your plane, walk away

  “Subterraneans,” and Low itself, ends in an impasse. After Bowie’s emotional nonsense incantation, the Gregorian-style chant returns, and so does the saxophone, making a final subdued, tentative stab at some sort of melodic line before the edifice crumbles, again seemingly mid-track. We’re refused the dramatic finale Bowie had given us on previous albums. There are no rock ’n’ roll suicides, histrionic torch songs, dystopian hysterics, femmes fatales who will be your living end.

  It strikes me that the nonsense lyric of “Subterraneans” has something of the childlike about it, of a small child struggling to explain the inexplicable with a confusion of words he doesn’t yet understand. Against the backdrop of the imaginary languages, hums, chants and vocal wordlessness of the second side, those first-side images of bedroom refuge now start to clarify, start to feel like a psychoanalytic return. We leave Low with the feeling that the journey we’ve made is a mapless, backwards one, to the blind, pre-lingual world that will remain forever mysterious.

  Paris, May 2005

  bibliography

  Books

  Bowie, Angie, Backstage Passes, Cooper Square Press, 2000

  Buckley, David, Strange Fascination, Virgin Publishing, 2001

  Gillman, Peter and Leni Gillman, Alias David Bowie, a Biography, Henry Holt & Co, 1987

  Juby, Kerry, In Other Words, Omnibus Press, 1986

  Pegg, Nicholas, The Complete David Bowie, Reynolds & Hearn, 2004

  Power, David, David Bowie: A Sense of Art, Pauper’s Press, 2003

  Sandford, Christopher, Bowie: Loving the Alien, Da Capo Press, 1998

  Tremlett, George, David Bowie: Living on the Brink, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1997

  Thompson, Dave, David Bowie: Moonage Daydream, Plexus Publishing, 1994

  Thomson, Elizabeth and David Gutman, eds., The Bowie Companion, 1996

  Websites

  http://www.algonet.se/∼bassman

  http://members.ol.com.au/rgriffin/goldenyears

  http://www.tonyvisconti.com

  http://www.menofmusic.com

  http://www.teenagewildlife.com

  http://www.bowiewonderworld.com

  A note on references:

  Some of the direct quotes from Bowie, Eno, Visconti et al. are from the works listed in the above bibliography, in particular those by David Buckley and Kerry Juby. However, most come from a wide range of articles published in the music press over the past 25 years. Quotes from Laurent Thibault are my translations from “Mémoires d’un Idiot” by Christophe Geudin, Recording Musicien, March 2002. For specific references for all other quotes, please contact me at hugowilcken@hotmail.com.

  * Barrett has been an influence on Eno as well. Barrett’s “Matilda Mother”—with its singularly enunciated singing style and its synth drones—seems to me to be something of a template for Eno’s early solo work. At the time of making Low, Eno actually owned the Farfisa organ used on that Barrett track; a Farfisa is also used on Low, although I’m not sure whether it’s the same one.