David Bowie's Low (5 page)

From there, Bowie moved to a large house at Clos-desMésanges, near Vevey, Switzerland. The move had been engineered by his wife, Angie, partly to get him away from Los Angeles, but largely for tax reasons. Bowie was supposedly settling down to family life with his five-year-old son and wife. But by this stage, their marriage (outrageously open even by seventies rock marriage standards) had more or less broken down in a morass of recriminations and jealousies. Angie had in particular taken against Bowie’s assistant Corinne Schwab, whom Bowie used to shield himself against the people he didn’t want to see. “Coco kept the irritating people out of his life,” his friend and producer Tony Visconti said in 1986, “and Angie had become one of them.” Often, Bowie would simply disappear altogether without telling Angie, sometimes to Berlin, and with only Coco in the know. It enraged Angie. The couple’s living arrangements became increasingly complicated; while Angie was away in London, Bowie would stay at the house, but when she was home, he’d book into a nearby hotel.

The idea had been to relax after the tour, but Bowie was clearly the sort who thrived on nervous energy, not relaxation. At Clos-des-Mésanges he amassed a library of 5,000 books and threw himself into reading them. Bowie had always been the intellectually curious autodidact, having left school at sixteen. But now it became something of an
obsession. During the tour, Bowie had travelled around Europe in a kind of cultural rage, going to concerts, visiting galleries, learning everything he could about art, classical music and literature. It was a reaction against America, but there was also an element of replacing one mania for another (albeit far healthier) one.

A life of leisure in the Swiss Alps for the workaholic Bowie was another mirage, and when Iggy Pop showed up they began to rehearse what would result in Iggy’s first solo venture,
The Idiot
, produced and cowritten by Bowie. He had admired Iggy’s proto-punk band the Stooges from early on; had got them signed to his then manager’s company, Mainman; had mixed the classic Stooges album
Raw Power;
had continually boosted Iggy Pop in the press. The two had become close in Los Angeles, when a washed-up Iggy Pop had checked himself into a mental asylum. “I think he respected me for putting myself in a loony bin,” Iggy said in 1977. “He was the only guy who came to visit me. Nobody else came …nobody. Not even my so-called friends in LA … but David came.” (At this time, back in England, Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother, Terry, had already been interned in a mental institution for some years.)

Various studio sessions during 1975 had produced little of worth (there’d been the dirge-like “Moving On,” never released, plus a couple of tracks that ended up on
Lust For Life
, changed beyond recognition). But Bowie had invited Iggy on the
Station to Station
tour, and early on in the sound-checks
they’d come up with “Sister Midnight,” based around a Carlos Alomar riff. Bowie had written the first verse and Iggy the rest, recounting an oedipal dream he’d once had. There was slippage between what was Bowie’s and what was Iggy’s, and Bowie had played “Sister Midnight” a few times live on tour, but it eventually became the first cut on
The Idiot
, as well as the first real fruit of their fertile (and later not so fertile) partnership.

Bowie remained in Clos-des-Mésanges for most of June, working, painting and reading. He paid visits to Charlie Chaplin’s wife, Oona, who lived nearby. (“This intelligent, very sensitive fellow who came from the same part of London as Charlie, walked in and wanted to talk. I really am very fond of him.”) He was often seen out and about in local bars and restaurants, dressed simply and generally keeping his head down. But by the end of the month he’d had enough, and decamped with Iggy Pop back to the Château d’Hérouville.

The sixteenth century Château was a former coach staging post and stables, built in the ruins of a castle, and was said to be the setting for secret trysts between Frédéric Chopin and his lover George Sand. Its vast wings contained some thirty bedrooms, rehearsal rooms, kitchens, a dining hall and a gaming room. Outside there was a swimming pool, tennis courts, a beautiful complex of fountains and waterfalls and even a mini-castle, complete with its own moat. The grounds were enormous and one had the impression
of being completely isolated and deep in the countryside, despite the fact that Paris was less than an hour away.

It was the first ever residential studio suite—a concept that was much copied afterwards. Two studios were located in outhouses, probably former stables, while a third was in the right wing. In 1976, it cost 5,500 francs (£550, $1,000) per day to hire a studio at the Château, not including tape, which was expensive back then (700 francs for a 50mm roll). Session musicians would get around 1,000 francs for a day’s work. The studios were very state-of-the art for the era; the one Bowie used for
The Idiot
and
Low
had an MCI-500 console and the first Westlake monitors to be installed in Europe. Originally opened in 1969, the Château studios had taken a few years before building up an international reputation, which eventually came when Elton John recorded
Honky Château
there in 1972. Since then, the Château’s ever-expanding clientèle counted the likes of Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, T-Rex, Rod Stewart, Bill Wyman, Cat Stevens and the Bee-Gees plus dozens of French artists.

Bowie and Iggy Pop settled in at the Château; their idea was to record when the mood took them, but to basically take it easy. On the face of it, they made for unlikely friends. Although there were certain things in common—both rock performers, both in something of a personal and artistic impasse, both struggling with drugs and mental health problems—it was basically a case of opposites attracting. Bowie was the sexually ambiguous English dandy; Iggy Pop the
hyper-masculine American rocker. Career-wise, Bowie was riding a tidal wave, his fame largely transcending the rock world. By contrast, Iggy Pop was at an all-time low, flat broke, without a band and without a recording contract, until Bowie used his weight to get him one at RCA. Bowie was the consummate professional: even during the nightmare of his cocaine addiction, he still toured his albums, touted himself regularly in the media, starred in a movie and, of course, made records that many consider his finest. Iggy Pop, on the other hand, was erratic, disorganised, had no self-discipline, wouldn’t turn up to studio sessions, hadn’t put out a record in years—and was essentially heading for a massive fall without the helping hand of someone of Bowie’s calibre.

It would seem that Iggy Pop needed Bowie a hell of a lot more than Bowie needed him. But Iggy had a certain underground cachet that Bowie probably envied. “I was not executive material like him,” Iggy Pop said in 1996. “I couldn’t do the things he seemed to do so well and so easily. Yet I knew I had something he didn’t have and could never have.” The Iggy persona was about danger and violence, urban edge, outlaw posturing, rawness, unrestrained liberty to the point of nihilism …in short, a blunt instrument of American masculinity, and the polar opposite of what Bowie was about at the time. “David always had a weakness for tough guys,” was how his friend Marc Bolan bitchily put it. Likewise, Iggy Pop had been intrigued by the “British
music-hall, pure vaudeville” quality he’d seen in Bowie the first time they’d met. In other words, it was a perfect match of alter egos.

There was a touch of Tom Ripley in the way Bowie adopted those he admired, as if they were another role to be played. Bowie had already sought out and befriended another American hard man, Lou Reed, in rather similar circumstances. Lou Reed’s former band the Velvet Underground was of course a legendary nexus of the sixties New York scene, but by the early seventies Reed was down on his luck and in desperate need of a leg up. Enter David Bowie, who talked Reed up in the media and produced
Transformer
(1972)—which did indeed transform Reed’s career through the classic hit “Walk on the Wild Side.” The album is largely about New York’s gay and transvestite scene, and the glammed-up Bowie certainly helped bring out Lou Reed’s inner drag queen. In a sense, he did the same for Iggy Pop, suffusing Iggy’s balls-out rock routine with a more ironic, cabaret sensibility, giving him a veneer of sleazy European sophistication.

For Bowie,
The Idiot
wasn’t just about resurrecting Iggy Pop’s stalled career. It was also a dry run for
Low
, with which it would be recorded almost back-to-back, in the same studios. In fact, the recordings overlapped. Sound engineer Laurent Thibault: “
Low
was recorded after
The Idiot
, but
Low
came out first. David didn’t want people to think he’d been inspired by Iggy’s album, when in fact it was all the same
thing. There were even tracks that we recorded for Iggy that ended up on
Low
, such as ‘What in the World,’ which was originally called ‘Isolation.’” (You can hear Iggy’s backing vocals on “What in the World.”) Bowie produced
The Idiot
, played many of the instruments and cowrote all the songs—the lyrics largely written by Iggy and the music by Bowie. “Poor Jim [Iggy’s real name], in a way, became a guinea pig for what I wanted to do with sound,” Bowie explained later. “I didn’t have the material at the time, and I didn’t feel like writing it all. I felt much more like laying back and getting behind someone else’s work, so that album was opportune, creatively.” Iggy Pop agrees: “[Bowie] has a work pattern that recurs again and again. If he has an idea about an area of work that he wants to enter, as a first step, he’ll use side-projects or work for other people to gain experience and gain a little taste of water before he goes in and does his …and I think he used working with me that way also.”

As with
Low
, the recording was all done at night, from around midnight on. Bowie covered keyboards, saxophone and most of the guitar parts; the other musicians were Michel Marie on drums and Laurent Thibault on bass. Phil Palmer, nephew of Kinks frontman Ray Davies, played guitar on “Nightclubbing,” “Dum Dum Boys” and “China Girl.” Carlos Alomar wasn’t present, but the rest of Bowie’s rhythm section (Dennis Davis and George Murray) turned up a few weeks in. According to Robert Fripp, Bowie had asked him and Eno to attend as well, but “it so happened
that David and Iggy had a dispute and the project was postponed.” Keyboardist Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream was also at the Château, but apparently had to leave before recording had got properly under way. And Ricky Gardiner, guitarist with prog rock group Beggar’s Opera, had also originally been asked to lend a hand on
The Idiot
, but “then I had this last-minute phone call saying that it was no longer necessary for me to go, and that Mr Bowie sent his apologies,” he later recalled. A few weeks later, he got another call summoning him to the Château, “asking could I go off …and perform miracles on the new album?” That new album was of course
Low
.

In the studio, Iggy would sit writing lyrics on the studio floor, surrounded by books and piles of paper. But musically, it was Bowie who was in control. He’d arrived with bits of instrumentals recorded on minicassettes, which he’d play to the musicians. The way he directed them was autistic to say the least: “I’d continually ask him if what we were playing was OK,” recalled Laurent Thibault in 2002. “He wouldn’t reply. He’d just stare at me without saying a word. That was when I realised he was never going to reply. For example, Bowie would be playing a Baldwin piano hooked up to a Marshall amp. Michel gets up from his drumkit to see what Bowie’s up to. Bowie still won’t say a word. And I’m recording it all. David would listen back to the tape, and once he was happy with the results, we’d move on to the next thing. After a while, we stopped bothering to ask him anything.”
They recorded quickly, without it ever being explicit whether they were working on Iggy’s album or Bowie’s.

According to Thibault,
Low
’s signature crashing drum sound was conceived in these sessions as well. The Château was the first in Europe to have an Eventide Harmonizer, which is an electronic pitch-shifting device—you could raise or lower the pitch of any instrument directly without having to slow the tape down, as had been previously necessary. Bowie apparently decided to hook the Harmonizer up to the drums, with astonishing results. This account doesn’t really square with Visconti’s, though (as we’ll see a little later on). And listening to
The Idiot
, although it does seem that some songs have a treated drum sound (particularly “Funtime”), it’s not nearly as evolved or as startling as what Visconti developed for
Low
.

At the time, Iggy Pop excitedly talked up
The Idiot
as a cross between Kraftwerk and James Brown. That’s an exaggeration, and would actually be a better description of the first side of
Low
.
The Idiot
is still mostly a rock album—replete with heavy metal–style licks—and doesn’t really play off a pop sensibility in the way
Low
does. But Bowie’s genre-thieving, magpie sensibility makes itself felt. A funk feel creeps in on most tracks; synthesisers fill out the sound (sometimes mimicking strings, sometimes as sound effects); an early use of a drum machine features on “Nightclubbing”; and the dissonant, wandering lead guitar lines (mostly played by Bowie) are pretty similar to what Ricky Gardiner achieved
on the first side of
Low
. The experimentalism is most apparent on the final track, “Mass Production,” with its looped industrial noise. “We made a tape loop using David’s ARP,” recalled Laurent Thibault, “but it sounded too erratic and David didn’t like it. So I had the idea of recording it on a quarter-inch tape, and once he was satisfied, I set up a loop so huge we had to set up mic stands right round the console. As the loop went round, you could see the little white joining tape, making it look like a toy train. David sat on his swivelling chair for three quarters of an hour, just watching the tape circle go round and round the four corners of the room, until finally he uttered the word ‘record.’” (Of course, this was in the days before sequencers—nowadays you could do all that on a computer in a few minutes.)