by Paul Trynka
Tony Visconti had first learned that David was starting a new album of his own when he’d been called by David and a man he introduced as his newest collaborator: Brian Eno. ‘They said to me, “What are you going to bring to the table?” says Visconti. ‘It was the first time I’d heard that phrase, which put me on the spot, so I had to think fast.’ Famously, Visconti responded that he had discovered a new digital delay unit, the Eventide Harmoniser, that could delay a sound, and change its pitch, independently of each other. His succinct explanation of the novel unit was that ‘it fucks with the fabric of time’. And he was in.
One other prospective collaborator never made the session. David had wanted to recruit Michael Rother from Neu! for the new album, which had the working title of New Music Night and Day. David asked a member of his staff to call the guitarist. Rother said yes; yet somehow German-speaking RCA staff sabotaged the collaboration, telling him Rother had declined.
When the sessions convened early in September at the Château D’Hérouville, all of the musicians were unsure as to what they’d encounter. Roy Young, Britain’s best-known boogie woogie pianist, had received a phone call from David at the Speakeasy. It was the second time David had called – Roy had been unable to make the Station to Station sessions – and while David was effusive, Young had no idea how his piano would fit in to Bowie’s music. The same applied to guitarist Ricky Gardiner, who, like Phil Palmer, was another Tony Visconti discovery – a replacement for Michael Rother. Young and Gardiner shared a plane out to Paris, nervously picking each other’s brains as to what they would be faced with.
As it turned out, the sessions were relaxed, with David sitting on the studio floor, showing Young, Gardiner, Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis little riffs, getting them to add their own feel, open-minded about what they’d come up with. But it felt strange: asked what his plan was, David was frank. ‘I’m not sure yet, till we develop it.’ Brian Eno, who Visconti had been told would be one of the key collaborators, did not arrive until later in the session, which increased the nervous tension. Visconti recalls, ‘We had defined it as an experiment. Before we went in, we said this might be a waste of a month of our lives. And it was three weeks before we knew it was working.’
All those present knew David was dealing with problems, deriving from an imminent legal battle with Michael Lippman; they sensed his preoccupation, but shared in the studio camaraderie. In the early weeks, David was more ebullient. But when Angie briefly arrived at the recording with boyfriend Roy Martin to ‘help the session along’, as one wit puts it, there was a huge fight in one of the rooms and the sound of glasses being thrown. Iggy and Visconti had to pull Martin and Bowie apart. David seemed to quite enjoy the drama, then worked up a groove with the rhythm section, which became ‘Breaking Glass’: ‘I’ve been breaking glass in your room again.’ The lyrics also warned Angie not to look at the carpet, a reference to his drawing Kabbala symbols on the floor back in Los Angeles. ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ was a reference to the time David crashed his Mercedes in Switzerland; the accident had additional comedy value because David was trying to raise some much-needed cash by selling the mangled vehicle.
As the tape rolled, the musicians relaxed, gamely replaying and revising, happy to be hanging out in luxury for two weeks. Drinks and food were on call twenty-four hours a day, and Roy Young kept the staff busy replenishing the bucket of ice which he kept on top of the piano alongside a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic. After one take, Young heard a ‘rat-tat-tat’ in his headphones and looked up to see David at the talk-back mic, holding up a glass. ‘So I sent him one in, mixed just how I had them,’ he says. ‘And this happened a few times.’
Some time later, Visconti announced that they had a possible take, and the band trooped in. As the tape rolled, David sat in his characteristic lotus position on a chair by the desk, chin resting on his hands, apparently deep in thought. The assembled musicians waited expectantly for several minutes to hear his verdict until they realised he was fast asleep. ‘And I will always remember, he scratched his head exactly like Oliver Hardy when he woke up,’ says Young, ‘and then Tony said, “David, I think you’d better go for a lie-down.”’
As David made his way down the steep stairway that led from the control room, there was a sudden thud, followed by a series of bumps, as he bounced down the wooden steps. The musicians all crowded around to check on their singer, sprawled in a heap on the floor below – all, that is, except for Roy Young. ‘I hid under my piano,’ he says, ‘petrified.’ The next morning David pulled up his shirt to reveal dark red weals all the way up his skinny ribcage; the spectacle was accompanied by Visconti’s warning that if another gin and tonic made its way into the control room, Young would be on the next plane home.
The lack of a clear outcome to these experiments was confusing, but at its heart was a simple, intuitive, brilliant leap forward. David’s intentions on the album that would become Low was to combine the glacial electronic instrumentation that he’d heard on Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream records, and combine them with a boisterous, vibrant R&B rhythm section. In sonic terms, the result was heavily influenced by Neu!, the band founded by Kraftwerk refugee Klaus Dinger – the harmonised, resonant guitar lines of Neu! songs like ‘Seeland’, from their last great album, Neu 75, have echoes throughout Low, and “Heroes”, too. But where Dinger’s drumming was static, a metronomic pulse, Dennis Davis’ spirit and energy drives the first half of Low ever onward.
A restless improviser, who worked in parallel with Roy Ayers throughout much of his time with Bowie, Davis was as obsessed with the recording process as Bowie and Visconti – who rigged up the Eventide Harmoniser on Davis’ snare drum, then fed the results through the drummer’s headphones so he could interact with its superhuman clunk. The constant counterpoint between the buoyant optimism of Davis, Alomar and Murray and the contemplative, intellectual clarity of Gardiner and Eno gives the album a delicious tension between optimism and anomie. The music reflected exactly David’s mental condition. ‘I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally. But overall, I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from Low.’
Throughout the summer of 1976, while the same old financial and legal crises continually menaced him, David’s main strategy – along with attempts to seek oblivion through sex or beer – was to find solace in problem-solving, piecing together The Idiot and Low like giant jigsaw puzzles. Iggy was his main partner in this occupational therapy; and David’s unfailing instinct for selecting collaborators had led him to Brian Eno.
David knew Eno vaguely from the very first Ziggy tour, when Roxy Music had shared the bill at The Croydon Greyhound, and later at the Rainbow show. They’d not kept in touch, but when Eno turned up at the Station to Station Wembley dates in May, David had exerted all his charm, telling him he’d been playing Eno’s Discreet Music throughout the American leg of the tour: ‘Naturally, flattery always endears you to someone,’ says Eno. ‘I thought, God, he must be smart.’
When he turned up, around ten days into the Low session, Eno effected a quiet revolution. Hired initially by Bowie because he represented a one-man entrée to ambient music, a genre he’d created pretty much single-handedly with Discreet Music and Another Green World, Eno was an inspired choice for accomplice, for his musical twists and turns paralleled David’s own journey. A grammar-school boy and art-school student, he had quit Roxy Music in July 1973, frustrated by their abandonment of art-rock experimentation. The cultural battle that took place within Roxy – Ferry’s penchant for cover versions and glossy artwork, versus Eno’s love for the random – echoed similar conflicts being played out in Bowie’s head. In broad terms, Eno was hired to play right brain to Bowie’s left brain; in musical terms, he was an inspired, punctilious synthesiser craftsman. In personal terms, he and Bowie were as sympatisch as they come, sharing a healthy sense of humour and a healthy streak of pretension, a taste for sexual adventure, and a love of re-enacting Peter Co
oke and Dudley Moore comedy routines.
In future years, Eno would often be inaccurately credited as the producer of Low; yet he was co-conspirator as well as hired hand. Arriving late in the sessions, he sat alongside Bowie as they briefed the musicians on the next stage of the recording, like a pair of avuncular Squadron Commanders prepared to wave their jittery recruits into the azure. ‘They sat us down and played us these tapes of the [The Man Who Fell to Earth] soundtrack and told us what they were planning,’ says Young. ‘It was out of our experience … and honestly, quite a few of us didn’t really like the idea.’ Bowie was acutely conscious that RCA might have a similar reaction. ‘We don’t know if this will ever be released,’ he told Young and the others, ‘but I have to do this.’
Eno arrived when the rhythm tracks for side one of Low were essentially complete; Murray and Davis flew home, while Carlos, Gardiner and Roy Young stayed on to work up the instrumental lines. Although Eno’s more unsettling managerial techniques – like his Burroughsian use of ‘Oblique Strategy cards’ – were not extensively deployed on this record, he was crucial in motivating both the musicians and Bowie, who was distracted by legal negotiations to extricate himself from Michael Lippman. Eno encouraged a bullish attitude in which, as Visconti puts it, ‘Whether the record company was behind it or not did not matter at that point – we simply made the most far-out album we could think of.’ Yet the musical discussions weren’t exclusively high-falutin’: the decision to augment the first batch of recordings with an instrumental side two followed a debate about whether Bowie fans would consider the results decent value for money. ‘We felt that getting six or seven songs with David Bowie singing, with choruses and verses, still made for a good album,’ says Visconti, ‘then making the second side instrumental gave a perfect Ying Yang balance.’
Indeed, the seven songs that made up the first side were all intricately worked, with an impeccable internal logic; David’s singing on the main vocal lines was his most honest and unaffected in years, offset by his vibratoed Brechtian yelps for the choruses. Soon a decade’s worth of imitators would copy the impressionistic lyrics, the low-key narrative vocal and foregrounded snare drum; yet none of them would share the sense of discovery of the Château sessions.
More low-key than David, happy to share japes with Iggy, Brian Eno often took a similar tack to David, picking people’s brains for ideas, quizzing the Château engineers about techniques other studio clients had used, patiently working out how to operate the desk and tape machine before asking to be left alone to painstakingly overdub harmonised parts one line at a time using his EMS AKS suitcase synth – a glorious object which looked like an overgrown Stylophone mated with the TARDIS control panel. Appropriately, Eno pieced together his parts to the sombre ‘Warszawa’ on the days when David had to drive in to Paris for soul-sapping meetings with Lippman’s lawyers at the Hotel Raphael. Once the backing tracks were finished, Visconti’s wife, singer Mary Hopkin, arrived at the Château to add her ‘doo-doo-doo’s to the introduction of ‘Sound and Vision’, while Tony and Mary’s son Morgan played with Zowie and Marion.
One day, Eno heard Morgan picking out three notes on the reception room piano; he used the simple sombre A, B, C as the main melody of ‘Warszawa’, later augmented with David’s devotional, wordless vocals, influenced by one of Eno’s favourite recordings of a Balkan boys’ choir.
Although Iggy is hardly audible on the Low recordings – his voice appears on ‘What in the World’, a survivor from the Idiot sessions – his laid-back humour was vital. He’d huddle with David after his gruelling legal meetings, which went on for days in a row, and use humour to ease him out of his exhausted, emotionally drained, state.
Towards the end of the recording, Iggy’s jokes developed into full-blown comedy monologues, based on the endless, hilarious disasters he and his fellow Stooges had suffered. One night he described how Stooges’ drummer Scotty used MainMan’s cash to buy a huge drum kit, which got smaller and smaller at each show. ‘A simple beat is where it’s at,’ Scotty assured the other Stooges, who soon realised he was selling the kit off, piece by piece, to support his smack habit. Another night, Iggy stripped off his shirt to show the scars on his chest – then mimed out how he was forced to roll in broken glass to end a song, the only foolproof way of making his fellow Stooges, nodding out on heroin, recognise the final bars. ‘We would just fall about, aching with laughter, our sides would hurt,’ says Visconti. David would listen to these picaresque stories for hours, shaking his head, telling Eno or Visconti, ‘This is unbelievable, I can’t imagine any human being went through this and lived.’ The tales of disaster, all true and rendered without any self-pity, were somehow soothing.
There were echoes of more ancient tragedies, too, according to Tony Visconti, who claims the spirits of the previous residents of the Château, star-crossed lovers Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, haunted the building. Bowie, too, considered it ‘a spooky place – I did refuse one bedroom, as it felt impossibly cold in certain areas’, he says today. Interrogated about the spectral presence, the Château’s staff dismiss the stories. ‘The ghosts were in the echo chambers,’ says Laurent Thibault, ‘that’s where the odd noises came from.’ Yet, delving deeper, it turns out that Visconti and Bowie were not the only ones to sense the pianist and his muse: Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore had similar experiences; while at one Ouiji-board session, ghostly messages turned out to be rendered in perfect Polish – Chopin’s native tongue. In later years, the Château staff attempted to damp down widespread gossip about spectral presences, which persisted until the studio closed in the wake of owner Michel Magne’s suicide.
David loved the Château – ‘It was a joy, ramshackle and comfy’ – but as his slot came to an end, his last days at the studio were marked by bickering. Visconti cordially detested rival bassist and producer Laurent Thibault, who was blamed for the presence of a reporter posing as a receptionist (she spent hours in David’s room, engaged in ‘research’). He also disliked the food and the alignment of the tape machines, and preferred the ‘Germanic efficiency’ of Hansa Studios. Visconti remembers he and David suffered food poisoning from warm cheese; so David, Tony, Brian and Iggy decamped to Berlin in mid-October, shortly before the news of David’s ‘exile’ in Europe broke in the German press, and then worldwide.
There were more overdubs to come at Hansa; first David, Eno and Visconti reviewed the tapes at Studio 1 on the Ku’Damm, before completing ‘Weeping Wall’ and ‘Subterraneans’ at the newly opened studio by the Wall. Their assistant and translator was Eduard Meyer, a qualified Ton-meister – sound-master – whom the trio would soon corrupt, subverting his formal training. They went easy on him first: when David discovered he was a skilled cellist, he asked him to add a cello line to ‘Art Decade’. ‘I am sorry, Mr Bowie,’ Meyer replied, ‘I am a score-reading musician, not an improvising one.’ Remembering the skills picked up from Frida Dinn’s Observer’s Book of Music, David wrote out a part in manuscript. It was among the last instrumental additions to an album that David knew represented the biggest risk of his career.
According to Visconti, when RCA heard the album, one executive told David, ‘If you make Young Americans Two instead, we’ll buy you a mansion in Philadelphia!’ David had been prone to occasional doubts when he’d completed albums in the past, but not this time. RCA’s confusion simply hardened his resolve. If that were not enough, when Tony Defries heard an acetate of Low, he dismissed it as ‘a piece of crap that even Nic Roeg turned down’ and refused to allow it to count to David’s contractual obligation towards him. What could be more perfect? Low would be a new beginning, and David Bowie’s estranged father figure wouldn’t even have a slice of it.
16
Helden
This was clearly an ex-war zone and now it was an international boundary, which was really scary. We recorded 500 feet from barbed wire, and a tall tower where you could see gun turrets, with foreign soldiers looking at us with binoculars. Everythi
ng said, ‘We shouldn’t be making a record here.’
Tony Visconti
Checkpoint Charlie, the fabled gateway between West and East Berlin. Tony Visconti, sitting alongside David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Coco Schwab, watches nervously as the guard scrutinises their passports, while his colleagues cradle their machine pistols ominously, all of them overseen by a low, glass-fronted watchtower. Suddenly, the guard calls for assistance: Friedrich, kommen sie hier! The party freezes, looking on as the second guard flips through the passports – suddenly both of the Prussian-Grey-uniformed figures, sidearms at their hips, break into laughter.
Visconti steps out of the Mercedes, and the guards point out the passport photos. ‘Iggy had this platinum hair, and Bambi eyes,’ says the producer. ‘Bowie had that dreadful curly perm from around “Space Oddity”.’ The two remade, remodelled, crop-haired stars, far from home, are forced to silently endure the ridicule, before finally driving out to the East, with its ruined buildings, derelict train tracks, women sporting fifties-style beehives, and the countryside beyond.
What might have surprised the guards even more, had they known it, was that for both rock stars, abandoning the hedonism, excess and silly haircuts of the West – i.e., exactly those values being kept out at gunpoint at Checkpoint Charlie – had brought David Bowie and Iggy Pop to a new ‘joy of life’, as David put it. ‘It was an education,’ says Iggy Pop, ‘always there was the idea, we’re trying to learn something here. And to be pretty disciplined about it.’