David Bowie's Low (2 page)

—David Bowie, 2001

I see
Low
as very much a continuation from
Station to Station
, which I think is one of the great records of all time.

—Brian Eno, 1999

The journey towards
Low
begins with the rattling pistons of a locomotive, opening the title track of David Bowie’s previous album
Station to Station
, recorded in Los Angeles in late 1975. Retro steam train noises fade in then move across the aural landscape, literally, from the left channel to
the right. (The album was actually recorded in quadraphonic sound—one of those forgotten hi-fi innovations of the seventies—with the train circling its way around all four speakers.) Bowie had pinched the train noises from a radio sound effects record, and had then further treated them in the studio, using equalisation and unconventional phasing methods, giving them that skewed, not-quite-real feeling that is emblematic of this strange album.

Those train sounds herald the theme of restless travel as a spiritual metaphor, also present on
Low
and the following albums of what Bowie calls his “Berlin triptych” (
Low
,
“Heroes”
,
Lodger
). Sonically,
Station to Station
is a voyage in itself, journeying from the mid-seventies funk of the New York disco scene to the pulsing
motorik
beat of experimental German bands such as Neu!, Can or Kraftwerk. In fact, those opening sound effects are pretty much an
hommage
to Kraftwerk’s unlikely 1974 hit
Autobahn
, which begins with a car revving up and driving off, the sound also crossing over from left to right channel.

Like
Autobahn
,
Station to Station
is a veritable epic in rock/pop terms. Clocking in at over ten minutes, this is the longest track Bowie has ever written (the instrumental introduction alone outdistances most songs on
Low
). It’s over a minute before Earl Slick’s guitar kicks in, mimicking at first a train whistle, then the clunking sounds of engines and wheels on track. “I got some quite extraordinary things out of Earl Slick,” Bowie has said. “I think it captured his imagination
to make noises on guitar, and textures, rather than playing the right notes.” That experimental groping towards sound as texture rather than chords and melody is definitely there all right, even if it’s not really followed through on the rest of the album.

From there on, there’s a gradual building up of instrumentation. A metronomic two-note piano figure sets up a self-consciously mechanical beat, which is almost immediately opposed by the R&B rhythm section of Dennis Davis (drums), George Murray (bass) and Carlos Alomar (guitar). Alomar’s funk licks battle it out with Slick’s noise guitar, while the mellotron overlays a melody line against a chaos of bizarre industrial sound effects.

Already, before Bowie has sung a note, a musical agenda is being laid down. Alomar sees it as “funky on the bass, but everything on top was just rock ’n’ roll.” That captures part of what it was: funk instrumentation with European-style lead melody. For Bowie, “
Station to Station
was really the rock-format version of what was to come on
Low
and
“Heroes”
. I was at the time well into German electronic music—Can, and all that. And Kraftwerk had made a big impression on me.” What Bowie was working his way towards was some kind of hybridisation between the R&B he’d already pastiched on
Young Americans
and the textures and beats of the German
Kosmische
bands (of whom more later), along with other experimentalists in both the rock and classical worlds. That hybridisation is mostly left suggested
on
Station to Station
. But new territory is clearly being marked out, quite different from earlier successes like
Hunky Dory
or
Ziggy Stardust
, which, from a musical perspective, remain conventional slices of English rock.

After the extended funk/industrial workout, Bowie’s vocals crash in, and things start to get weird. The first half-dozen lines pack in a bewildering array of allusions to gnosticism, black magic and the kabbala (a medieval school of Jewish mysticism). “The return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes / The return of the thin white duke, making sure white stains.” This is for initiates only—the sexual/drug connotations of the “white stains” may be obvious enough, but the casual listener will hardly pick up that it’s also the title of an obscure book of poetry by the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). “Throwing darts in lovers’ eyes” also references Crowley, alluding to a no doubt apocryphal incident in 1918, when Crowley killed a young couple in a magical rite that involved hurling darts.

A mangled version of a famous line from Shakespeare’s
Tempest
(“such is the stuff from where dreams are woven”) recalls another magician, Prospero, who is of course a duke, banished to an island (“tall in my room overlooking the ocean,” as Bowie puts it). And the “magical movement from kether to melkuth” suggests more than a passing interest in
The Tree of Life
, a kabbalistic treatise written by Crowley disciple Israel Regardie. The Tree of Life is a mystical diagram
in which
kether
represents the godhead and
melkuth
the physical world, while the magical movement between the two enacts the Gnostic myth of the Fall. In the booklet of the current remaster of the album, an anaemic Bowie is to be seen sketching out the Tree of Life on a studio floor.

It doesn’t end there: there are plenty of other occult allusions to be teased out—“lost in my circle,” “flashing no colour,” “sunbirds to soar with” all have their specific mystical meanings. According to Bowie, the song is almost a “step-by-step interpretation of the kabbala, although absolutely no one else realised that at the time, of course.” That’s something of an exaggeration—intellectually, the mix of references is rather confused, although it works extremely well on a poetic level.

Crowleyism was not a rock novelty in 1975. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was a disciple; Can’s extraordinary
Tago Mago
(1971) alludes to Crowley; and arguably the most famous LP ever,
Sgt Pepper
, depicts Crowley on its cover. Previous Bowie songs also reference occultism (“Quicksand” namechecks Crowley, Himmler and the Golden Dawn society of which both were members), and traces of it subsist on later albums, including
Low
. But never was it so blatant as on
Station to Station
. What are we to make of this? Certain critics make a great deal indeed. The late Ian McDonald (whose
Revolution in the Head
remains the benchmark of Beatles literature) grandly depicts Bowie as a Prospero figure executing an “exorcism of the self, of mind,
of the past ….Bowie has ascended the Tree of Life; now he wants to come down to earth, to love,” and to “cast his occult
grimoire
into the ocean.”

There’s another, rather more prosaic reading of these black magic ramblings. “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine,” Bowie opines a little further on in the song, but I think we can safely assume a case of protesting too much. Because the
Station to Station
sessions represent the high-water mark of Bowie’s prodigious drug intake. By this stage, Bowie had practically stopped eating and was subsisting on a diet of milk, cocaine and four packets of Gitanes a day. He was leading a vampyric existence of blinds-drawn seclusion in his Hollywood mansion, spliced with all-night sessions in the studio. There were times when he’d start recording in the evening then work all the way through until ten in the morning—and when told that the studio had been booked for another band, he’d simply call up for studio time elsewhere on the spot and start work again immediately. Other times, he could vanish altogether: “We show up at the studio,” says Slick. “‘Where is he?’ He shows up maybe five or six hours late. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up at all.” At this stage, Bowie could go five or six days without sleep, the point at which reality and imagination become irretrievably blurred: “By the end of the week my whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.”

Essentially, Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, a condition very similar to schizophrenia, with its highly distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking. His interviews of the time are classics of messianic delusion, as he raves on about Hitler being the first rock star, or his own political ambitions (“I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism.”). The flipside of messianic fantasy is of course paranoid delusion, which Bowie also displayed in spades. He imagined one of his advisers was a CIA agent; a backing singer was apparently a vampire. During one interview, Bowie suddenly leapt up and pulled down the blind: “I’ve got to do this,” he jabbered. “I just saw a body fall.” He proceeded to light a black candle then blow it out. “It’s only a protection. I’ve been getting a little trouble from the neighbours.” How much of all this was theatre and how much delusion? Bowie was evidently past making such distinctions. His wife of the time, Angie, recounts getting a phone call from him one day in 1975; Bowie was somewhere in Los Angeles with a warlock and two witches who wanted to steal his semen for a black magic ritual. “He was talking in slurred, hushed tones, and hardly making any sense and he was crazed with fear.”

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.”