Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “One of the reasons that a lot of interesting music appeared then was the more subordinate role taken by company accountants,” guitarist Ricky Gardiner, who lived in the Château and played on these sessions, says of the period. “We made albums we wanted to make; we experimented. To be an artist necessarily involves raising one’s head above the parapet to take whatever follows.”

  The Château was wired with an elaborate and clunky bank of synthesizers collected by Bowie and Visconti. Eno would saunter into the main room, pick up a small keyboard and begin pressing buttons. Occasionally he’d ask Visconti what these instruments were meant to do. One, the Event Harmonizer, he was told, “fucks with the fabric of time.” Eno grinned and loudly declared that they must use it as much as possible. Eno brought some loopy prototype instruments of his own, such as a synth housed in a leather briefcase and manipulated by a joystick. Built by an electronics company called EMS, it was deemed unsuitable for the marketplace but fit perfectly with their symphony of rejected instrumentation.

  “Then, as now, technology was on the move, so every recording studio had something new to explore,” Gardiner says. “Perhaps the difference then was that things were being invented which meant we had no reference points. Now, things are being developed, copied and modeled and used to re-create rather than to create.”

  The psychic scars of his isolation in Los Angeles had not yet healed, but Bowie instinctively threw himself headlong into this recording, and like his experience filming The Man Who Fell to Earth, the immersion in an ambitious creative endeavor eventually delivered him into a safer realm. “He was pretty much living at the edge of his nervous system, very tense,” Eno observed. “But as often happens, that translated into a sense of complete abandon in the work. One of the things that happens when you’re going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control.”

  Once actual songs like “Sound and Vision,” “Breaking Glass” and “Always Crashing in the Same Car” began to take form, it became clear to all not only that an actual album was being constructed, but that this album would, perhaps more than any other, reflect Bowie’s mental struggle. The songs that ended up on the album’s first side, for example, are uniformly short (three minutes each) and sung by an artist not looking to mask or poeticize his mental anguish, but rather to scream at them with what amounts to a strange pride, or at least the absence of crippling shame or devious encryption. He, like many of the synths they were using, was a reject, dysfunctional, discarded. Vocally, it amounts to a demented soul record, a future sound that, unlike that of Kraftwerk, makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s assembled by human beings with all their frailties and vulnerabilities. The rhythms of Low sometimes emulate factory floors and chemical labs. Drums crash like steam shooting from a vent pipe; the bass burbles lightly like a toxic substance in a glass beaker being purified over a Bunsen burner. The guitars come in cold and impossibly mellow and the misfit synthesizers, especially on the more modal second side, float every empty sonic space like a new pollution. It all shakes and bends like it’s being played by hand and not machines but feels riveted together, a modern machine.

  “They were doing what few other people were trying to do—which was to create an art within the realm of popular music,” classical composer Philip Glass (who released a symphonic version of the album in 1992) has said. “I listened to it constantly.”

  An entire movement of post-punk bands, including Joy Division, Magazine, Gang of Four and Wire, all fed off Low’s odd anti-aggression and unapologetic, almost metaphorical use of synthesized music. Many of these bands were comprised of working-class kids with no money, but in emulation of what they thought Bowie behaved like and how he had come to dress post-Ziggy, they fortified their new movement with an air of art and ennui-damaged café decadence. By day, they walked the same streets and lingered in the same pubs that they always had, but when they sang, they were in Berlin or Warsaw or Prague or Paris, or, in the case of Joy Division (who covered the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray”), in the back room at Max’s Kansas City off Manhattan’s Union Square.

  Bowie had used synths before. There’s the Stylophone on “Space Oddity” and Walter Carlos’s Moog-ed Beethoven that Ziggy and the Spiders took the stage to. Synths can be heard on Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs, but they had never taken a front seat as they did on Low, and they were still viewed with a stigma by many rock purists.

  “People had used synths,” Thomas Dolby says, “as some quirky fellow instruments. And there’d been some pure electronic stuff in the charts like ‘Popcorn’ and Switched-On Bach, but nobody had done serious rock, pop music with electronics. Nobody of his popularity certainly. It was an incredibly powerful time, really. I think that was really the sort of incendiary moment when the whole generation of us started looking to electronics, exploring coming up with a new sound.”

  “I also think it’s Low’s inhibition and repression that Joy Division and others responded to,” Simon Reynolds says. “The fact that the music, while guitar-based and harsh and aggressive, never rocks out. It’s imploded aggression. And that’s very British, and particularly very northern British. People do bottle it all up. So Iggy going from ‘Loose’ to a sound that was very much not-loose resonated for your British.”

  When Low was completed and delivered to RCA, the label brass, predictably, had a fit. They could not follow up back-to-back hits with this. Bowie insisted that the record was complete and ready for them to release. RCA, so desperate for sellable summer product, opted to issue a best-of instead, ChangesOneBowie, in May. This album stands as one of the most satisfying singles collections ever released, proving just how agile Bowie had become with regard to including at least one perfect radio song on each of his post-Ziggy RCA albums. The Mercury single “Space Oddity,” bought back by Tony Defries before his departure, opens side one. The label used the stopgap period to try to reason with their immovable star, but soon the Christmas shopping window came and went as well. Low finally hit shops intact in mid-January of 1977. Some critics were as baffled and incensed as RCA was. Charles Shaar Murray gave it more of an indictment than a review in the NME.

  “I had gotten through a nasty eighteen-month amphetamine addiction,” he says today. “I recognized in Low a depiction, possibly a glamorization, of the kind of speed psychosis. Bowie had a much bigger budget than I did. I recognized it as the psychosis of soft white powder. I thought he was glamorizing the state from which I just clawed myself. I put it to him and he admitted, ‘Yeah, that’s what it was.’ I think Low is a fantastic record. I never had any misgivings concerning its artistic merit. But I found it an evil record at the time because of my personal situation. It made what I just rid myself of seem cool again. With a major speed thing beginning to happen among punks at that time, this is a great piece of art but it’s seriously not helpful socially.” Low certainly did much to make mental illness, chemically induced or otherwise, seem a bit more fashionable, but this is more a triumph of confidence than some prurient and conscious decision to spread such antisocial energy as if it were a dance craze. Bowie made coming apart seem elegant, but Low, as self-aware as any dawn-of-the-decade, denim-clad-singer-songwriter affair, gave an often overlooked depth to the act of putting one’s fractured self back together. Released just a week after his thirtieth birthday, Low would mark the beginning of Bowie’s “mature” period. This, when speaking of rock stars, is of course relative, but Low, named the greatest album of the seventies by Pitchfork, provides a well-engineered bridge to elder states-manhood. Like Iggy, Bowie had now become a godfather.

  The divided Berlin that David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Tony Visconti and Coco Schwab inhabited in early ’77 while recording Pop’s second solo album Lust for Life and Bowie’s “Heroes,” the only somewhat more commercially minded follow-up to the heroically uncompromising Low, isn’t the same unified Berlin now available to visitors. Today, chipped pieces of the Wall are mount
ed on postcards and flogged in gift shops along Potsdamer Platz. In ’77, a careless wanderer could still get shot at by guards at Checkpoint Charlie.

  The Berlin of 2009 is a new bohemia full of art kids, galleries, clubs, squatting punks and Gothic hipster bars. It’s no different than the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. There is a common element, however, to unified Berlin and Cold War Berlin. Both the culture-mall city and the broken, divided city full of addicts, criminals and radicals were kinetic. The movement never stops, and for a mind as electrified as David Bowie’s it provided an ideal cerebral clockwork. Visit Berlin for three days and you will remain kinetic for three days, mostly via very short rides on the U2. Even drunks, staggering on foot, don’t stand still for too long. Every pedestrian seems to be mounted on tracks.

  Berlin was and is the perfect city for a person to escape to, as nobody looks up from their pagers or laptop. Every Berliner is so deep in their own head, starring in their own one-person Spalding Gray meets Synecdoche, New York–style internal monologue, that it’s easy to see how it would be appealing for a superstar like Bowie was in ’77. It’s a private metropolis, each denizen existing inside their own expressionist cinema show as they go out or go home for the night, but really just … go.

  20.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD ALONG the Haupstrasse, where Bowie and Iggy settled upon arriving in West Berlin, was a cheap, seedy, downmarket-hip Turkish neighborhood. Today, it’s a semigentrified, somewhat more expensive, seedy hip Turkish neighborhood. Locating the building that Corinne Schwab rented for them is easy. The number is unchanged, and so is the facade with its cream-colored plaster walls, huge marble-arched doorway, and ornate brown metal door. To the right, there’s a red bubble gum vending machine with dirty, smudged glass. To the left, the Lotus tattoo parlor. The foyer, with its mosaic tiles, dark mahogany molding, high ceilings and winding, red-carpeted stairway, is also unchanged.

  The building is over one hundred years old. It survived two world wars. There are a lot of stories to tell about it. The misadventures of David Bowie and his best friend Iggy Pop are just two of the life stories that unfolded up those stairs. Bowie and Iggy were able to work and enjoy more peace and privacy here than either of them had ever known. Unlike in L.A., the hustlers and dealers were kept away unless they were summoned, and that summoning only happened on the weekends.

  Bowie, as he sings on the title track of “Heroes,” drank “all the time,” weaning himself off cocaine as he sat over a pint of German beer in his proletariat garb: tweed cap, simple shoes or sandals, black leather coat and wool trousers. At the top of the week, they would write and record; the remainder of their days were earmarked for recreation, essentially cutting in half their potential drug intake. Massively influenced and excited by the German expressionism that he’d mined for the White Light tour, a life in Berlin, among the people, seemed a logical next step.

  “It was the artistic and cultural gateway of Europe in the twenties and virtually anything important that happened in the arts happened there. I wanted to plug into that instead of L.A. and their seedy magic shops,” he has said.

  Exit the old building and one will likely spend some time lingering in the bins in front of the Bucherhalle, a cavernous antique bookstore directly left of the flat. This shop must have added to the appeal of the neighborhood for Bowie, a major bibliophile. Standing under the yellow-and-white-striped awning, thumbing through clothbound copies, one can not only forget that one is an English rock star, but possibly that one even speaks English. Bowie had succeeded, once again, in disappearing. “Hansa [Studios] was more austere,” says Ricky Gardiner (who plays on The Idiot and came up with the immortal bouncing riff for “The Passenger”) of the studio where Lust for Life and “Heroes” were created. “It had larger spaces. It had huge curtains for making different spaces. It had stark lighting. It was probably technically better, but does this make for better music? It depends what music you are after. David was interested in Kraftwerk at the time, so I expect that had a bearing on it. It was handy, new premises, new vibe, new inspiration.”

  Iggy Pop recruited Hunt and Tony Sales, then just out of their teens. The Sales brothers had played with Todd Rundgren during his short-lived period as leader of the art rock band Runt and backed Iggy and James Williamson on the cult “demo” album Kill City. The sons of legendary children’s television show host Soupy Sales, they were barely out of their teens when they arrived in Berlin. The Sales brothers, Hunt on drums and Tony on bass, would round out, with Gardiner and Bowie (on keyboards), Iggy’s touring and recording band. The tracks on Lust for Life would take The Idiot to a new level. The title track, which kicks off with Hunt Sales’s open-tuned drumbeat (inspired by session drummer Shelly Manne’s round, swinging percussion on the Man with the Golden Arm soundtrack and the “Peter Gunn Theme”), is of course ubiquitous now thanks to its use in the 1996 film Trainspotting and, to a more cloying effect, on the Carnival cruise line commercials.

  “When I hear it now on television,” Hunt Sales tells me, “it’s just primal. It gets everything going.” Few tracks in pop history—James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” and Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” among them—are iconic in and of themselves. The first line of “Constructive Summer,” for example, the opening track on indie heroes the Hold Steady’s fourth album, Stay Positive, is this: “Me and my friends are like the drums on ‘Lust for Life.’”

  Lust for Life is more carnal than The Idiot. In a lot of ways, it’s the better record, but it certainly finds its narrator panting after underage girls in knee-high leather boots (“Sixteen”) as much as it finds him searching his soul (or maybe the panting is part of the soul-searching).

  “Sex, booze, drugs,” Hunt Sales says. “Berlin was open twenty-four hours a day. Bars, clubs. It had a vibe then. You had all these people within the Wall. That’s gotta do something to people’s psyche. You know what I mean? Being trapped in this place. I think it found its way into the records.”

  “Hansa Studios was an interesting place at the time. The Berlin Wall was still up. Berlin was really something you couldn’t pin down at all,” John Cale, who recorded with fellow ex–Velvet Underground member Nico in the city around this time, recalled. “You’d have to drive through East Germany to get there. Being in West Berlin was very different from what it is now: everyone was nuts, living on the edge. It was a real circus over there. When Brian and I did that Nico concert where she insisted on singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ [in October 1974 at the Nationalgalerie], they went nuts. All the young people there were living with the Wall. It was a fiery place to be. There was a lot of distrust near the border, but West Berlin was partying twenty-four/seven.”

  Inside Hansa there was always the uneasy sense of being monitored, which might have contributed to the defiant emotionalism of the lyrics Bowie began to write (as well as the vocals he would soon deliver). One day, while staring out at the Wall from the studio’s fourth-floor window, Bowie spotted Visconti and his mistress, the singer Antonia Maas, sharing a kiss only a few hundred yards in the distance. He imagined the Communist guards, who stood constantly atop the checkpoint looking down on them, clutching their rifles. Bowie knew a bit about what life was like on the east side of the wall. He and Visconti had crossed the borderline as tourists and were familiar with the radically different way of life on the other side, how everything seemed to have frozen a quarter century before them, the cars, the fashions, the queer old Trabant autos.

  As he wrote, Bowie imagined two lovers, one on the East Berlin side, another on the West Berlin side, who must meet quickly and fleetingly, a sort of Cold War Romeo and Juliet. Under constant risk of arrest or death, they dream of being free, swimming together like dolphins (anyone who has been to the area on a hot afternoon can attest that the notion of sleek aquatic mammals gliding under cool waves does not come immediately to mind).

  Bowie and Eno, the song’s cowriter, agreed that the idea, lyrics and melody were among his strongest ever and
quickly began parsing out musical options. What makes “Heroes” arguably David Bowie’s finest song, however, was a product of happenstance. Robert Fripp, the former King Crimson guitarist, knew both Bowie and Eno (he appears on Another Green World) and was suggested by the latter. In New York at the time, he flew out to Berlin on short notice, went straight to the studio, was played the melody and immediately began improvising the signature circular riff, which articulates the longing, aching lyrics and Bowie’s dramatic, Judy Garland–worthy larynx-straining delivery.

  “‘Heroes’ was a searing, wonderful guitar thing,” recalled Adrian Belew, who would play the riff every night on the subsequent world tour. “He was so hot, he’d rip your head off. Robert was always able to carve out his own little ideas in guitar playing that are instantly recognizable.” Fripp did three full takes once the riff was down, and after rewinding it for playback, Visconti, at the desk, accidentally played all three at once. “I casually played three guitar takes together and it had a jaw-dropping effect on all of us,” Visconti writes in his autobiography. “The constant mutation of the three sounds was entirely complementary and we had the intro of ‘Heroes’ without doing anything more. It’s now instantly recognizable as sound in our collective psyche.”

  Using a device developed and perfected on many of Iggy’s Lust for Life tracks (such as “Success” and “Turn Blue”), the backing vocals used for “Heroes,” on which Eno can be clearly detected, repeat and thereby reinforce the lyrics. “I … I can remember,” Bowie shouts; “I remember,” Eno and the band echo, doing much to gin up the emotions, and deftly complement the swirling drone of the multitracked guitars.