by Pat Gilbert
Bowie and the dancer and nightclub manager Romy Haag at Alcazar, Paris, May 1976.
Bowie looks out from behind the keys during The Idiot tour’s stop at the Berkeley Community Theater, April 13, 1977.
The Sales brothers, then in their mid-twenties, injected a wildness into Bowie and Iggy’s Berlin existence that had previously laid dormant, and visits to sex bars and nightclubs became a nightly event. The group having bonded in this old-fashioned style, the tour opened in Britain on March 1 at the perennial Bowie stronghold of Friars Aylesbury. Rumors that David Bowie was performing in Iggy Pop’s band had persisted in the press, but no one was sure whether the whispers were true, and promoters were under strict instructions not to advertise Bowie’s presence. On the afternoon of the Friars show, one of the trucks full of equipment traveling from Berlin didn’t arrive until 4:00 p.m., resulting in a few frayed nerves—though apparently not Bowie’s. Journalist Kris Needs remembered him seeming happy and relaxed in his flat cap, “milling around, looking surprisingly healthy and oddly normal.” During the show, Bowie barely looked at the crowd, leaving the histrionics to Iggy, who hadn’t played live in Britain since appearing at London’s Scala cinema in June 1972. Among the audience was a celebrity punk contingent, including Johnny Thunders, the Damned’s Brian James, and Glen Matlock, who’d recently left the Sex Pistols.
The presence of several punk icons underlined Iggy’s status as the movement’s godfather but also Bowie’s unimpeachable credentials as an ultra-cool rock great. His Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, and Thin White Duke incarnations, not to mention his iconic role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, were written into UK punk’s DNA, and Low’s out-there electronic stylings had done nothing to diminish his reputation as an innovator and outsider. In 1976 and 1977, Bowie was one of the few established British rock artists whom the punk elite didn’t view as clapped-out or overblown. The Clash’s Brixton-raised bassist and style icon, Paul Simonon, had once even been approached to act as a Bowie decoy.
The six-date UK tour—featuring songs from The Idiot, the Stooges’ back catalog, and several new compositions destined for Iggy’s next album—climaxed with two nights at London’s Rainbow before moving on to North America, requiring Bowie to fly for the first time since his Ziggy days. In the States, the partying descended into scenes of debauchery worthy of Bowie’s darkest days and temporarily made a mockery of Bowie and Iggy’s attempt to stay relatively clean. Yet there were also periods of relative calm. Chris Stein, the founding member of Blondie, which was support on several dates, recalled to the author how “professional” both men were “and how accommodating. It was a momentous event in my career. Bowie didn’t go out much, he stayed in his hotel, I don’t know if he had a girl with him. There was a wonderful moment when me, [drummer] Clem Burke, [bassist] Gary Valentine, and Iggy went to the local punk house in Seattle. We went upstairs where all these kids were crashing, there were some amps and guitars, and we did ‘Wild Thing’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ standing on a mattress. For years, people would come up and say they were there—maybe fifty actually were.”
Iggy Pop’s second Bowie-helmed LP, Lust for Life, was released just five months after the first, The Idiot.
By the end of the tour, Bowie and Iggy’s relationship was strained, with what Bowie later referred to as the “unbelievable” consumption of drugs a major contributing factor. Yet footage of the band performing on The Dinah Shore Show in Los Angeles on the penultimate day of touring reveals a musical unit in a suitably raw and committed state. When the tour finished, Bowie and Iggy returned to Berlin, where they quickly put the travails of the tour—and drugs—behind them and began work in Hansa 1 on what would become Iggy’s solo masterwork, Lust for Life.
For the sessions, produced by Bowie, Iggy, and engineer Colin Thurston under the nom de guerre “The Bewlay Bros,” Bowie used The Idiot’s touring band plus Carlos Alomar on guitar and Warren Peace on backing vocals. The whole album was recorded at great speed—it took just over a week—partly because Bowie and Iggy wanted to spend as little money as possible on studio time so they could split what was left of the advance from RCA. The thunderous title track was, somewhat incredibly, written by Bowie on a ukulele, while mimicking the Morse code–like intro to the news on the American Forces Network TV channel, one of the few English-language stations available in West Berlin. “The Passenger,” another highlight, was cooked up from a chord sequence that Ricky Gardiner chanced upon one day. In a process that Bowie would use to great effect on his next album, Iggy would often write lyrics on the spot, though the dark poetry of “The Passenger” and other tracks suggested that there was a great deal of craft involved too. Unlike The Idiot, whose release had been postponed until after Bowie’s next album appeared, Lust for Life was rushed out in August at the height of Britain’s interest in punk.
Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, and David Bowie during the “Heroes” sessions at Hansa Tonstudios, summer 1977.
With Iggy’s album in the bag, Bowie lost no time in assembling a band to record his own record. Dennis Davis and George Murray flew to Berlin to join Alomar, and together with Visconti they took rooms at the Gerhus at Bowie’s own expense. Eno was invited too and joined Bowie at Hauptstrasse, while Iggy (who didn’t play on the sessions) moved with his girlfriend Esther Friedman into the servants’ quarters at the rear of the Hauptstrasse apartment. The experience of recording Lust for Life had impressed on Bowie just how quickly an album could be turned around if the musicians adhered to a strict regime, and conscious of the hotel bill he would soon receive, he encouraged a daily noon-to-eight work regimen to get the backing tracks in place as soon as possible. Each day began with Bowie eating raw eggs and Eno enjoying a bowl of cereal; the evenings, meanwhile, were spent at Romy Haag’s nightclub and other lively hangouts, drinking in Berlin’s decadent vibe.
Low had mostly been recorded in France, of course, so for Bowie’s American rhythm section, the experience of working in West Berlin was a new one. Alomar, there for The Idiot, recalled a dislike of some of the local German men, whom he regarded as boorish and chauvinistic. This further hastened the desire to get the job over with as soon as possible. The group set up in the Meistersaal, helping Visconti produce the album’s full, resonant sound. In contrast to Bowie’s earliest albums, preceded by weeks of rehearsals and carefully charted arrangements, Bowie embarked on the “Heroes” sessions with a sketch of just one song, “Sons of the Silent Age,” a dramatic but characteristically opaque meditation on Germany’s Weimar youth, lifting lyrics from Jacques Brel, delivered with an eccentric Cockney vocal not that far removed from the songs on his 1967 debut album. For the rest of the material, a spontaneous methodology prevailed, sometimes incorporating jazz-style excursions into improvisation and “real-time” composition. The most spectacular of these experiments was the title track, “Heroes,” graced by the almost preternatural talent of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, a longtime ally of Eno’s, who’d contributed guitar to Another Green World and, at the age of thirty-one, had considered himself “retired” from playing music. Fripp arrived in West Berlin jetlagged, but he immediately added a first-take guitar overdub to “Beauty and the Beast” that made it to the final mix. His contributions to “Heroes” were similarly extemporaneous; Visconti blended Fripp’s three different “live” passes of lead guitar into the unsettling, transcendental sound that characterized the finished song. The guitarist’s work was completed in a single six-hour session, after which he packed up his case and flew back to England.
A Spanish picture-disc edition of “Be My Wife,” the second single drawn from Low.
One of Bowie’s most enduring songs, “Heroes” would be released in numerous different editions—and recorded in various different languages.
On much of the album, Bowie had taken a page out of Iggy’s book to create in-the-moment lyrics, and for “Heroes,” he went so far as to record each new line as Visconti stopped and started the tape, a process that resulted in the song’s stra
nge, disconcerting story of two lovers, caught in an ephemeral but also eternal moment of bliss. Bowie was coy about his inspiration for the lovers “standing by The Wall,” who “kissed, as though nothing could fall,” though it was revealed after Visconti’s separation from his wife Mary Hopkin that Bowie had glimpsed the producer and his then-secret paramour, backing singer Antonia Maass, canoodling under the gaze of the East German watchtower guards. The romantic image of love flowering in such a desolate, disquieting setting became central to the song’s evergreen appeal, particularly so considering that, as with most of the other tracks, “Heroes” was initially conceived as an instrumental.
The Germanic influence on “Heroes” was clear; synths were more prominent than ever before, and Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider (and Hitler’s last-gasp rocket bomb) were namechecked in the instrumental “V-2 Schneider.” But once again, the Alomar-Murray-Davis axis imbued the music with an indelible funkiness, while on “Sons of the Silent Age,” Bowie added liberal doses of jazzy sax to temper the floes of frosty, glacial electronica that characterized much of the album’s second side, including the instrumentals “Sense of Doubt,” “Moss Garden” (on which Bowie played a Japanese string instrument called a “koto”), and the somber, despondent “Neukoln,” named for the area in West Berlin in which Turkish workers were billeted. “Sense of Doubt” and “Moss Garden” resulted directly from an Oblique Strategies session, with Eno and Bowie unaware of the instruction the other had picked.
After the rhythm section had finished its job and returned home, Bowie, Eno, and Visconti continued work on the record over the summer, finishing the final mixes at Mountain Studios in Montreux, not far from Bowie’s Swiss retreat. The engineer at Mountain was David Richards, soon to become another regular Bowie collaborator, and his assistant Eugene Chaplin, son of comedian Charlie. “Heroes”’ cover shot, taken by photographer Masayoshi Sukita, showed Bowie recreating Erich Heckel’s 1917 portrait Roquairol—just as Iggy had mimicked the pose of the artist’s Young Man for the sleeve of The Idiot. The reference to expressionist art was apt: a more complete and confident record than Low, “Heroes” was an album of stark contrasts and profound emotional depth, with a desolate tenor that reflected the extraordinary city in which it was created. “Berlin really captured, unlike anything else at that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass,” Bowie explained.
After taking a break in Spain, Bowie prepared for his first significant series of media interviews in nearly two years in advance of the album’s release on October 14, 1977. Promotion got underway in September with an appearance on Marc, a British TV show hosted by his old friend and sparring partner, Marc Bolan, whose career had taken an unexpected upswing in the wake of punk. (As with Bowie and the Kinks, Bolan was never a target of punk hostility, and indeed that summer he’d hired the Damned to support him on tour.) But where once Bowie and Bolan had been equals, there was no longer any doubt as to who was top dog. Marc was filmed in Manchester, and for this, the final episode of the series, Bowie was due to mime to “Heroes,” lifted from the album as its lead single. The mood was initially convivial, but Bolan suddenly flipped when he wasn’t asked to play over Bowie’s pre-recorded backing track. Then, when Bowie’s camera run-throughs were due to start, the studio doors were suddenly locked and everyone but the crew asked to leave.
Bowie’s “Heroes” LP, featuring a cover photograph inspired by the German expressionist Erich Heckel’s Roquairol.
Jeff Dexter, a club DJ and 1960s scenester who used to go UFO spotting with Bowie in 1968, found his path blocked by an unfamiliar security guard. “I barged past and discovered that some artist liaison guy at RCA had closed down the set,” he told Q’s Johnny Black. Dexter sought out Bolan in the production office, only to find him rowing with Bowie over the fact Bowie’s “people” were dictating the arrangements for his show. Dexter recalls that “it almost came to fisticuffs,” with Bowie protesting he knew nothing about RCA’s intervention. Things eventually simmered down and filming began, the program ending with Bowie jamming live with the host. That evening, Bowie and Bolan laughed off their spat over dinner in London, but they would never see each other again: nine days later, Marc Bolan died in a car crash, spookily driving into the same tree in Barnes that had claimed the life of Diamond Dogs engineer Keith Harwood two weeks earlier.
A lighthearted moment from Bowie’s appearance on Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, taped on September 9, 1977.
Bowie and Marc Bolan during a taping of the latter’s British TV show Marc, September 5, 1977.
A striking print ad for Bowie’s “Heroes,” and the Peter and the Wolf album he recorded, in part, as a Christmas gift to his six-year-old son.
Four days after filming Marc, Bowie was back in a television studio again, this time at Elstree near London for the prerecording of a TV special, Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas. Bowie’s appearance was primarily to mime to “Heroes”—with a new vocal take—but also involved a festive duet with the legendary American crooner, then in his seventies. The producers’ choice was “Little Drummer Boy,” but when he arrived, Bowie declared that he disliked the song and would prefer to sing something else. The show’s musical supervisors, Ian Fraser and Larry Grossman, agreed to create a variation on the composition, miraculously knocking up “Peace on Earth” on a piano they found in the basement. Thus Bowie and Crosby duetted on what has subsequently become a much-loved Christmas staple, “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.” Bowie found the recording “a bizarre experience,” particularly as the ailing Crosby came across as if “there was no one at home at all”; in fact, Crosby died soon after his appearance with Bowie was filmed.
“Heroes” reached No. 3 in the UK but worryingly only made No. 35 in the States, where Bowie’s sojourn in Berlin had removed him from the limelight—as, of course, was his intention. In Britain, meanwhile, a shrewd marketing campaign proclaimed, “There’s New Wave, Old Wave, and there’s David Bowie,” reaffirming the singer’s sanctity as rock’s uber-cool one-of-a-kind. As to punk itself, Bowie would later admit that “it passed me by,” an entirely believable comment considering his career trajectory in 1977, which ended with his narrating the children’s story Peter and the Wolf for a recording featuring Prokofiev’s magnificent score performed by the Philadelphia Philharmonic. Bowie considered the album, made in New York in December and released in May 1978, a Christmas gift to his son, Zowie, now six years old.
Christmas with Bowie, Iggy, and Coco Schwab in Berlin was a happy affair but triggered an angry reaction from Angie, who appeared in the British tabloid press peddling a dubious story about her husband having taken Zowie from the house in Switzerland without her permission. Soon after, Angie overdosed on sleeping pills but survived. These events effectively ended their marriage, and in January 1978, Bowie began divorce proceedings while preparing for his first major acting role since The Man Who Fell to Earth. The film, Just a Gigolo, was set in Germany at the end of World War I and directed by David Hemmings, star of the era-defining 1966 movie Blow-Up. Hemmings had enticed Bowie to take the part of a Prussian officer, who turns to prostitution, by coaxing German silent screen Marlene Dietrich out of retirement to play Baroness von Semering. Bowie looked undeniably amazing, whether in military uniform, black tie, or shabby cloth cap and coat, but the script proved poor, and worse, he and Dietrich didn’t share any scenes together, though the film was cut to suggest they did.
While Bowie was filming, Schwab—now heading Bowie’s Isolar management company—and RCA were organizing what would become the singer’s biggest tour so far and occupy him for most of the year. It had been almost two years since he had played live, and the world was hungry to see an artist whose reclusion in Berlin had only added to his extraordinary mystique. Rehearsals began in Dallas in March, with a group that Bowie had hoped would feature Eno and Fripp. But as neither liked touring, the Alomar-Murray-Davis back line was instead augmented by Adrian Belew from Frank Zappa
’s band on guitar, Sean Mayes from Fumble on piano, and keyboardist Roger Powell, who’d recently played with Todd Rundgren’s group Utopia. Bowie also hired violinist Simon House, whom he’d last encountered during his days hanging out with Hermione Farthingale back in 1968.
Carlos Alomar was put in charge of drilling the group in Dallas before Bowie arrived after a holiday with his son. The idea for the Isolar II dates, or the Stage tour as it became known, was to focus heavily on Low and “Heroes” and employ a striking but simple set featuring strips of fluorescent lights against a dark backdrop. Bowie’s stylish outfits were designed by his old friend Natasha Korniloff, with whom he’d toured in Lindsay Kemp’s Pierrot in Turquoise a decade earlier. The costumes were most memorable for the capacious pleated pantaloons that were soon copied by fashion outlets and marketed as “Bowie pants.”
The front and back covers of the program for Bowie’s first world tour in two years, which he dubbed Isolar II.
The tour opened on March 29 at San Diego’s Sports Arena in front of a crowd of around fifteen thousand, unsure quite what to expect. The stark, futuristic staging created an appropriate setting for Bowie’s new synth-heavy sound, heralded by the opening number, “Warszawa,” whose desolate tones still hung in the air as the strident opening bars of “Heroes” kicked in. During rehearsals, Bowie had decided, seemingly on a whim, that audiences should be treated to a seven-song suite of Ziggy material, to be played after a short interval to further intensify the unexpected pleasure of hearing highlights from his iconic breakthrough album. The group was requested to learn the whole record, from which Bowie settled on a shortlist of “Five Years,” “Soul Love,” “Star,” “Hang On to Yourself,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Suffragette City,” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” The reaction to the Ziggy numbers was euphoric, as was the reception for the whole show, which ended with a stunningly funky version of “Sound and Vision.” Such was the buzz that, when the group returned to their hotel after the show, they jammed together in the bar before Bowie suffered a brief relapse in his attempt to stay off cocaine and embarked on an all-night bender.
