David Bowie's Low

by Hugo Wilcken

  This was also the phase where Eno would often be left alone in the studio to lay down a “sonic bed.” Eno: “I was trying to give some kind of sonic character to the track so that the thing had a distinct textural feel that gave it a mood to begin with.… It’s hard to describe that because it was never the same twice, and it’s not susceptible to description very easily in ordinary musical terms. It would just be doing the thing that you can do with tape so that you can treat the music as malleable. You have something down there but then you can start squeezing it around and changing the colour of this and putting this thing much further in front of something else and so on.”

  Where the rhythm section was about finding the groove that worked—in other words, locating the pattern—Eno was more concerned with breaking those patterns that the mind instinctively slotted into, when left to its own devices. One of the methods that he and Bowie used on Low was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs.

  Did the Oblique Strategy cards actually work? They were probably more important symbolically than practically. A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more need of a mental circuit-breaker than someone like Bowie, who was a natural improviser, collagiste, artistic gadfly. Anyone involved in the creative arts knows that chance events in the process play an important role, but to my mind there’s something slightly self-defeating about the idea of “planned accidents.” Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: “Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you’ve got to understand something. I’m a musician. I’ve studied music theory, I’ve studied counterpoint and I’m used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: ‘Here’s the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.’ So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, ‘This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.’ I totally, totally resisted it. David and Brian were two intellectual guys and they had a very different camaraderie, a heavier conversation, a Europeanness. It was too heavy for me. He and Brian would get off on talking about music in terms of history and I’d think, ‘Well that’s stupid—history isn’t going to give you a hook for the song!’ I’m interested in what’s commercial, what’s funky and what’s going to make people dance!” It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno’s experimentalism that was more productive than the “planned accidents” themselves. As Eno himself has said: “The interesting place is not chaos, and it’s not total coherence. It’s somewhere on the cusp of those two.”

  The final stage of the recording would be the actual generation of a song. Bowie would experiment in front of the microphone, trying out different voices with different emotive qualities, eventually finding the one that would fit the song. There would be suggestions from Visconti and Eno, but this phase was more uniquely Bowie’s show than any other’s. Once he’d found the voice, the rest would slip into place—a melody line would materialise; the lyrics would find their shape. Some songs (“Sound and Vision,” “Always Crashing in the Same Car”) had extra verses, but when Bowie listened back he decided he didn’t like them and they got wiped. In a way, he was doing everything backwards: nailing the context first, and finding the content afterwards. And ultimately, the lyric was as much texture as voice intonation or instrumental background—to the point that the words in “Warszawa” are literally in an imaginary language, the semantic content bleached right out of the lyric.

  through morning’s thoughts

  Low kicks off with a brief ode to movement, “Speed of Life.” The difference between this opener and that of Bowie’s previous album could hardly be more striking. As we’ve seen, Station to Station’s title track is a sweeping epic of cocaine romance. Although it has no narrative in the storybook sense, there is nonetheless a lyric arc that moves from the alienated magician “lost in my circle,” to redemption in the “European canon.” There is a musical arc too, with a succession of melody lines and a progression of themes. By contrast, “Speed of Life” is an instrumental—Bowie’s first ever—and so has no narrative to offer. (Originally it was supposed to have lyrics, as was “A New Career in a New Town,” but Bowie struggled to come up with the words on Low, and in the end these two pieces were left as they were.) Musically, it is not structured progressively, but cyclically (major theme repeated four times, bridge, minor theme repeated twice, major theme repeated four times, bridge, etc.). “Station” was a series of fragments spliced together and stretched out to breaking point. But “Speed of Life” is a fragment in isolation—as are most of the tracks on side one. (Eno: “He arrived with all these strange pieces, long and short, which already had their own form and structure. The idea was to work together to give the songs a more normal structure. I told him not to change them, to leave them in their bizarre, abnormal state.”)

  Like “Station to Station,” “Speed of Life” fades in. But whereas “Station” has a train slowly coming in over the horizon, the fade-in to “Speed of Life” is abrupt, as if you’d arrived late and opened the door on a band in session. The album has already started without you! And that sense of catch-up never lets up on the track, which drives frenetically on until fade-out. It feels a little like one of the instrumentals from Eno’s Another Green World, only re-recorded by someone in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.

  The first thing you notice is the startling drum crash, like a fist pounding at your speaker. “When it came out, I thought Low was the sound of the future,” recalled Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris. “When recording the Ideal for Living LP, I remember we kept asking the engineer to make the drums sound like ‘Speed of Life’—strangely enough he couldn’t.” It was a trick Visconti used with the Eventide Harmonizer. He sent the snare to the Harmonizer, which dropped the pitch, then fed it straight back to the drummer. It was done live, so Dennis Davis was hearing the distortion as he played, and responding accordingly. Visconti added the two onto the mix to get Low’s signature sound, which is not just the thump but also a descending echo. Visconti: “When the album came out the Harmonizer still wasn’t widely available. I had loads of producers phoning me and asking what I had done, but I wouldn’t tell them. I asked, instead, how they thought I did it and I got some great answers that I found inspirational. One producer insisted I compressed the drum tracks three separate times and slowed the tape down every time, or something like that.” The heavily treated drums and the foregrounding of the bass was another inversion—instead of just getting the bass and drums down and doing the creative stuff on top, Visconti and Bowie were refocusing on the rhythm, which goes to the heart of what popular music is about. The sound itself later became a post-punk trope when producers finally twigged to how it was done, but at the time it was a radical departure.

  Sonically, the first side of Low is about things opposing each other—the synthetic versus the organic, noise versus music, the abrasive versus the melodic. And it’s all already there on “Speed of Life.” The first sounds are the fade-in of a scratchy,
descending dissonant synth noise—vaguely reminiscent of the one in “Mass Production”—which then plays over the swirling guitar and ARP arpeggios that make up the main theme (actually recycled from the intro of Bowie’s novelty non-hit “The Laughing Gnome,” from his wannabe light entertainer days). Everything is descending on this track: treated drums, lead guitar, synth effects, harmonising synths. And all the different elements are fighting it out, aggressively drawing attention to themselves as if in an orchestra composed of soloists. This is an album where the seams show: no bones are made about processed quality of the sound, which refuses to cohere in the way it did on Station to Station. Essentially, it’s an artier take on Station’s funk-krautrock hybrid.

  Just at the moment you might expect the track to develop into something else, or for the vocal to finally materialise (as it did after “Station to Station’s” extended intro), “Speed of Life” fades out. It’s a matter of deflecting expectations. Eno again: “What I think he was trying to do was to duck the momentum of a successful career. The main problem with success is that it has a huge momentum. It’s like you’ve got this big train behind you and it wants you to carry on going the same way. Nobody wants you to step off the tracks and start looking round in the scrub around the edges because nobody can see anything promising there.”

  i’ll never touch you

  We have to wait for the second track before we get any Bowie vocals. “Breaking Glass” is another fragment, not even making two minutes, and probably the shortest song Bowie has ever recorded. It’s got the heavily treated funk-disco beat, Eno’s moog fanning from right to left speaker, and a menacing Carlos Alomar rock riff—one of the few stabs at a rock sensibility on the album. According to Alomar, “Dennis Davis had a lot to do with that. David wanted a song that was much lighter and much sillier, and ‘Breaking Glass’ was definitely it. If you leave a hole open in the music, you’re going to get a signature line on the guitar for the introduction, which I duly did. For the rest of the song, I wanted to ape a Jew’s harp, just a drone. We were just having fun. If you listen to all the quirks in the music—the call and response stuff between bass, guitar and drums—that was done with just three members of the band.”

  The last time we heard Bowie singing on record, on the final track of Station to Station, he was offering a seriously histrionic reading of the Tiomkin/Washington song “Wild Is the Wind.” Bowie’s neurotic croon on Station to Station—which owed more than a passing debt to Scott Walker—cranked up the drama value another few notches, adding to the weirdly tense atmosphere of that album. In complete contrast, Bowie comes over flat and monotone on “Breaking Glass.” The alienation is still very much to the forefront, but it’s no longer romantically overwrought. It’s withdrawn and autistic. (One of the curious things about the album is how it surrenders what look like Bowie’s strong points: his voice and his lyrics.) Iggy Pop’s deadpan delivery on The Idiot is probably something of an influence, but in any case Bowie escapes the exaggerated vocal stylings that had characterised his work to date.

  The lyric is also a fragment. There’s no verse and chorus, just a few lines sung flatly, with a weirdly random emphasis on certain words (“Baby, I’ve BEEN breaking glass in your ROOM again/Don’t look at the CARPET, I drew something AWFUL-ON-IT”). And there’s no baroque imagery, no throwing darts in lovers’ eyes. Alomar is not wrong to say that “Breaking Glass” is the light, silly song of the album, because there is something comic about the lyric, something of the child who knows he’s been naughty. But there’s also something creepily psycho about it, and the tension between the two is what makes it work.

  In “What in the World” and “Sound and Vision,” the bedroom is where we retreat to, to shut the world out. But the room in “Breaking Glass” is an altogether darker place. It’s the locus of occult ritual. The track’s title is most probably an occult allusion, and drawing “something awful” on the carpet certainly is. “Well, it is a contrived image, yes,” Bowie said in 2001. “It refers to both the kabbalistic drawings of the Tree of Life and the conjuring of spirits.” The single-line “Listen” and “See” are also strangely incantatory (as well as presaging “Sound and Vision”). Is Bowie commenting on the doomy, fetishised existence he’d led in Los Angeles? Or are the magical obsessions still current? Probably a bit of both. Although LA marked the highpoint of his cocaine psychosis and related occult fixations, they subsisted, and it was years before he could entirely shake them off. Throughout 1977 and 1978, the letters he would send friends and associates were marked with special numbers, to which he would ascribe occult meanings. While recording Low, he refused to sleep in the Château’s master bedroom on the grounds that it was haunted. (And he seemed to persuade the others that it was too. Visconti: “The talk every night seemed to be about the ghosts that haunt the place.”) Paranoia was a constant problem in his working relationships, to the point that even close collaborators like Visconti could come under suspicion. The hallucinations, too, persisted. “For the first two or three years afterward, while I was living in Berlin, I would have days where things were moving in the room,” Bowie later recalled, “and this was when I was totally straight.”

  The lyric seems to have been composed in cut-up Burroughs fashion, where Bowie would take phrases he’d written and rearrange them in disorientating ways, trying to break down the sense for new meanings to emerge—or to cancel each other out. “Don’t look” is followed by “See”; and “You’re such a wonderful person” is followed by “But you got problems, I’ll never touch you.” The lyric is like a conversational fragment in which a psychotic who has just trashed his girlfriend’s room is telling her that she’s the mad one. It’s a solipsistic world in which the psychosis is projected onto the other. The lyrics and intonation are without affect, without angst or self-awareness; we’re seeing the psychosis from the inside.

  That solipsism seems to me to be one of the psychological keys to the album. Everything becomes a reflection of the self, until you lose sight of where the self stops and the world begins. The instrumentals of the second side are tone poems that are ostensibly about places—Warsaw and Berlin. But they’re really interior landscapes, extrapolating the world from the self. And that whole dialectic of objectivity and subjectivity informs the German Expressionist painters of the Die Brücke and Neue Sachlichkeit movements that Bowie was so keen on at around that time (of whom more later). Bowie once said that the work of the Die Brücke artists gave him the feeling that they were “describing something just as it was disappearing.” That could aptly be applied to most of the songs on the first half of Low. Like “Speed of Life,” “Breaking Glass” fades out just as the riff is starting to sink in. Just at the moment you think it might be leading somewhere, it’s gone. According to Visconti, Bowie “couldn’t come up with any lyrics when he was doing the music and thus that’s why everything seems to fade.” It was a case of making a virtue out of failure, out of running into a wall.

  Through the occult allusions, “Breaking Glass” thematically links back to Station to Station. And the two albums, Station to Station and Low, are like the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Station is weird Crowley-esque mythology, girlfriends who disappear into the TV set and talking to God—it’s a loghorreic stew of exaggeration, simmering hysteria and delusion. And Low is the other side of the psychosis. It’s an autistic world of isolation and withdrawal, fragmentary thinking and mood swing, alogia and affective flattening …“I’ll never touch you.”

  je est un autre

  But it would be way too reductive to suggest that Bowie made a schizophrenic album because he was schizophrenic. The connections are a little more interesting than that. Bowie certainly drugged himself into a state in which schizophrenic-like behaviour emerged, although even through the worst of it he never totally spun out of orbit, as his professionalism and work rate testify. There’s a part of his drug addiction that falls into cliché. After all, Bowie was hardly the only rock star in mid-seventies L
A burning himself out on cocaine. Each era has its drug which translates its myth—in the mid-sixties, LSD reflected a naïve optimism about the possibility of change; and in the mid-seventies, cocaine echoed the grandiose nihilism of post-Manson LA. And Bowie fell into that trap.

  Above and beyond all that, Bowie had long had a fascination with and horror of madness. It had informed most of his work to date, The Man Who Sold the World in particular. In the mid-seventies, Bowie often talked about the strain of madness that ran through his family, and his fear of inheriting it. His half-brother, Terry Burns, really was a schizophrenic. Terry was nine years older, and someone Bowie clearly looked up to as he was growing up. “It was Terry who started everything for me” he has said; their relationship was “extremely close.” His brother was also artistically inclined (as many schizophrenics are), and acted as a mentor to Bowie, introducing him to jazz and rock, suggesting books to read—including Burroughs and Kerouac, with their Beat message of enlightenment through excess. Bowie’s interest in Buddhism, which can perhaps be felt on Low, was also initially triggered by his brother. Terry’s schizophrenia developed in the mid-sixties and he spent most of the rest of his life institutionalised. Bowie visited him at the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in 1982, after which Terry developed a fixation on him, convinced that Bowie would return to rescue him. They didn’t meet again, and Terry committed suicide in 1985. Bowie’s 1970 track “All the Madmen” and his 1993 single “Jump They Say” are both about Terry, as is “The Bewlay Brothers” (1971) in all likelihood.