David Bowie's Low (10 page)

The next two songs, the Ballardian “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and “Be My Wife,” signal a slight shift in form and mood. They both nod to a more conventional song structure, with “Be My Wife” even featuring a chorus of sorts. “Always Crashing” has a metal-ish guitar solo (albeit heavily treated), and even a proper end rather than a fadeout. Both have more of a narrative feel—elliptic and impressionistic though it might be. And both move into more self-aware, introspective territory, after the autism-from-the-inside of the preceding three tracks.

The rhythm bed of “Always Crashing in the Same Car” was laid down at the Château, but the song was one of the last to be completed at Hansa studios in Berlin in November 1976. “David spent quite a while writing the melody and lyrics,” recounted Visconti in 2001, “and even recorded a verse in a quasi-Dylan voice. But it was too spooky (not
funny, as intended), so he asked me to erase it and we started again (in those days tracks were limited, since computers and time sync codes, to latch two machines together, were not in use yet).” The brief lyric was inspired by a real event. One night, in the grip of paranoid psychosis, Bowie had been cruising the streets in his Mercedes and had spotted a dealer whom he was convinced had ripped him off. In a rage he started ramming the dealer’s car over and over again, before finally driving off back to his hotel. There he found himself maniacally driving around in circles in the hotel’s underground garage.

Bowie has said that Syd Barrett was an influence on “Be My Wife,” but the lyrics to “Always Crashing” also recall certain lines from Barrett’s
Madcap Laughs
, an album that Bowie has often praised, and has referenced before (the jokey, skewed snatches of studio chatter on “Andy Warhol” from
Hunky Dory
mimic those of “The Madcap Laughs”). Bowie’s “I was going round and round the hotel garage, must have been touching close to ninety-four” is pretty close to Barrett’s “You’re spinning around and around in a car with electric lights flashing very fast” (from “No Good Trying”). Likewise, “Jasmine, I saw you peeping, as I put my foot down to the floor” has something of Barrett’s melancholy “Dark Globe” (a song Bowie has singled out as
Madcap
’s highlight): “Oh where are you now, pussy willow that smiled on this leaf, when I was alone, you promised a stone from your heart.” (And there’s also “singing through
the gloom,” from the James Joyce poem “Golden Hair” that Barrett set to music on
Madcap
, which recalls Bowie’s “talking through the gloom.”)

Syd Barrett has been one of the touchstones of Bowie’s artistic development. Seeing the charismatic Barrett perform with Pink Floyd at the Marquee in 1967 made Bowie realise what an English rock star could be—and of course Bowie went on to record Barrett’s “See Emily Play” on
Pin-Ups
. There is a fair amount of Barrett in the Ziggy Stardust character (the Arnold Corns, the band Bowie initially formed to record the first Ziggy songs, was named after Barrett’s song “Arnold Layne”). Before
Ziggy Stardust
there was
Hunky Dory
, which shows traces of Barrett’s post-Floyd solo work in its whimsy and its acoustic, psych-folk feel. And the first side of
Low
, too, has something of Barrett’s solo work about it. There’s a similar attention deficiency, a slapdash feel; the songs—with their odd harmonic twists that musically don’t quite cohere—stop seemingly halfway through as if the singer has suddenly lost interest. There’s also the flat tone of the singing, the lyric mix of peculiar juxtapositions coupled with the occasional cliché, and the sudden mood swings and musical changes (“A New Career in a New Town”). Above all, there’s the impression of seeing the schizophrenic mind from the inside, without too much awareness of the madness, and yet with introspective self-pity straining through every now and then, as it does on “Always Crashing in the
Same Car.”
*

It’s a song about repeated failure transformed into recurring nightmare, with suicidal overtones. The image of crashing over and over again, and deliberately (“as I put my foot down to the floor”), recalls Iggy’s “though I try to die you put me back on the line.” The slower beat, Eno’s swirling synth instrumentation and the ghostly keyboard treatments add to the track’s oneiric feel. If “Always Crashing” doesn’t feature the bedroom symbolism of the preceding three songs, the vision of a car tearing around a hotel garage nonetheless echoes the album’s central image of enclosed spaces that both stifle and comfort. Instead of journeying from A to B, a car is turning around on itself, the only possible exit being into the deserts of the interior.

There’s something Kraftwerkian and nostalgically retro about the theremin-like sounds Eno engineered on this track, recalling the futurism that synthesisers signalled in the popular culture of the fifties and sixties—in movie soundtracks like
The Forbidden Planet
(1956) for instance, or the theme tunes to “Star Trek” or “Doctor Who” (written in the early sixties with an ancestor of the EMS synth Eno used on
Low
). In sixties pop, synths were used to sometimes gimmicky effect during the psychedelic years of 1966–67; they were then largely co-opted by prog rock groups in the early seventies, where a noodling synth sound often represented not so much machine futurism but fantasies of expanding consciousness and other suspect hippie notions. By the time of 1976’s punk revolution, however, “electronic stuff was considered something you couldn’t touch,” explains onetime Ultravox! frontman John Foxx, who was also working with Eno at the time and moving in similar directions to Bowie and Kraftwerk. “It was too close to Pink Floyd, forbidden by Johnny Lydon, declared ungood.”

By Bowie’s own admission, punk “was virtually over by the time it lodged itself in my awareness.” In a way, Bowie managed to wrongfoot the zeitgeist by not even being aware of it, instead channelling the themes and strategies that would become familiar in the post-punk era of the late seventies and early eighties.
Low
’s turn away from American to European romanticism, its focus on alienated subjectivities, on the artificial and the urban, its mix of modernist imagery and postmodern pastiche, its forefronting of a synthetic sound—these were all trademarks picked up in part or in toto by post-punk bands like Joy Division, Ultravox!, the Human League or American acts like Talking Heads and Devo.

There’s a sonic link between “Be My Wife” and the
Station to Station
album in its knees-up pub piano style that is also used on “TVC-15” (
Station
’s fourth track). “Be My Wife” is about as conventional as it gets on
Low
, and was the second single taken from the album. It has a verse and chorus and sticks to fairly straightforward band instrumentation. Essentially, though, it’s still another mixed-up pastiche, coupling an English pub singalong feel with Dennis Davis’s aggressive drum crash, a kitsch organ drone, lyrics that are too straightforward to be taken at face value, and Bowie’s camped-up cockney accent that recalls his Newleyesque days as a would-be light entertainer. Britpop bands like Blur and Pulp clearly owe a debt to this song, and in turn, as Bowie remarked recently, “‘Be My Wife’ owes a lot to Syd Barrett, actually.” Certainly, Barrett’s ability to integrate English whimsy and vaudeville into a rock format
finds an echo here, and that Englishness underlines the fact that
Low
is very much Bowie’s post-American album.

The lyric is the most straightforward of the album, and takes up
Station to Station
’s theme of restless travel as spiritual metaphor: “I’ve lived all over the world, I’ve left every place.” But its dumb simplicity is something of a tease. “Please be mine, share my life, stay with me, be my wife …” Could this be anything but irony? The fact is that Bowie’s marriage at this stage was in the final stages of disintegration. He would only see his wife a handful of times more, and would soon set about gaining legal custody of his son through the courts. So it was a rather strange refrain to be singing. And yet …the song isn’t exactly ironic either. At least a part of the “sincerity” is sincere, and the passivity of its plea—asking for something but offering nothing—-is of a piece with the rest of the album’s lyrics. The song ends poignantly with the first line of a verse that is never completed. “It was genuinely anguished, I think,” Bowie once said of the song, before adding: “It could have been anybody, though.” That ambivalence strikes pretty much at the heart of not only the song and the first side of
Low
, but almost everything else Bowie did in the seventies. He’d always located himself in that interesting space where even the singer doesn’t quite know what to make of his material. Is Bowie’s
Young Americans
a straightforward celebration of Philly soul, or a tricksy postmodern appropriation of it? Surely a bit of both. (Eno has said of Bowie’s 1992 marriage
ceremony in Florence that “you couldn’t tell what was sincere and what was theatre. It was very touching.”)

“Be My Wife” was released as a single in June 1977, but unlike “Sound and Vision” it failed to make a dent in the charts on either side of the Atlantic. Bowie did, however, bother to make a video for it, directed by Stanley Dorfman, and it’s undoubtedly one of his best efforts. A heavily made-up Bowie self-consciously hams it up with an unplugged guitar, illustrating the track’s ambivalences with unsettling aplomb. “I think what’s really unusual about it is the halfheartedness, the clumsiness,” says writer and recording artist Momus (aka Nick Currie). “It’s basically a rock video featuring a Pierrot act, a mime sketch of a rock star making a rock video, yet too comically glum and sulky to go through the required hoops, and lacking the necessary gung ho conviction. Ninety-nine percent of rock videos have full-throttle conviction, conviction turned up to 11. But here Bowie mimes a desultory half-heartedness with deft physical theatre. The character (because it isn’t really Bowie, it’s a fellow, a sad sack, a thin-lipped melancholic) makes to play his guitar and gives up half way through the phrase. He just can’t be bothered. He’s awkward, but the awkwardness is performed very gracefully. There’s something of Buster Keaton in the performance, the grace with which clumsiness is evoked. (Keaton gets a little homage in a much later Bowie video, ‘Miracle Goodnight.’)”

Two instrumentals, “Speed of Life” and “A New Career in a New Town,” bookend the first side—although they are somehow more songs without words than real instrumentals. “A New Career in a New Town” has no words apart from the unspoken title, and yet it conjures up perfectly the feeling of moving to a new town alone, with the mix of anxiety, solitude, nervous anticipation, forced optimism and the sense of looking forwards and back at the same time. The track was recorded at the Château, but the title no doubt came later, after Bowie’s move to Berlin.

The track starts with a brief, fragile electronic passage, reminiscent of the textural interludes on
Radio-Activity
, although a touch more off-kilter than that. A smothered bass drum taps out a delicate beat that has an interestingly proto-House feel. It contrasts wildly with the crashing snare that comes in abruptly at 0:36 with the entirely different second
theme, accompanied by Bowie’s blues harmonica, and another bar-room melody in a “Be My Wife” mode, plonked out on treated keyboards. Again there is no bridge to return us to the initial Kraftwerkian fragment, which kicks in abruptly again at 1:22, before returning us again to the blues/honky-tonk of the second theme again at 1:36. Just as “Speed of Life” sets down a musical agenda of instruments fighting it out, “A New Career” takes it to an extreme, literally splicing together two fragments that seem to be not only two quite different bits of music but in two altogether different genres as well. Ultimately, it works, with both parts yearning towards something in their different ways.

The track is really the sonic equivalent of a Burroughs cut-up, juxtaposing clean-lined electronica with old-fashioned piano and harmonica to reflect that feeling of arriving and departing all at the same time. I’m intrigued as to how such experimentalist techniques often work better when transposed to popular culture, necessarily years and decades and eras after they were first deployed in the avant-garde of high modernism. Burroughs’s cut-up method, as he applied it, is philosophically engaging but doesn’t make for great reading (arguably, his best efforts are his more conventional autobiographical works,
Junky
and
Queer
). Perhaps something similar could be said about Stockhausen’s electronics or Cage’s tape loops. But modernist ideas, by now very second-hand, when appropriated by people like Bowie or Eno, can result in work that is just as culturally vital or
even more so. Lazarus-like, modernism seemed to inject itself into popular culture years after its demise in the high cultures of art, literature and music. In a way, popular music as it developed in the fifties and sixties turns the cultural paradigm on its head. With pop, postmodernism always came before modernism. Pop culture didn’t actually need an Andy Warhol to make it postmodern. Rock ’n’ roll was never anything but a faked-up blues—something that the glam-era Bowie had understood perfectly. (Eno: “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.”)

Sessions at the Château d′Hérouville didn’t go smoothly. Most of the staff were on holiday, and the service was bad. “After three days I noticed that the sound got duller and duller,” recalled Visconti, “and I asked my assistant, a lovely English chap, when was the last time the multitrack recorder was lined up? He said about a week before we arrived, then the technician went on holiday. My assistant was brand new, hired just for us because he could speak English and French. He didn’t know how to maintain the machines. So every morning I’d go into the control room with him and we’d line up the machine together, with the manual open, hoping for the best.”