by Paul Trynka
In Berlin, play and so-called work were intertwined. It was a rare week that involved no recording, or administration, but there were plenty of days when they could ramble however they chose. David and Iggy might spend such a day wandering around the antique markets on Winterfeldplatz, or book shops and cafés down by St Matthias Kirche. Iggy would often rise early and walk for five or eight miles; eventually he claimed to have explored every nook and cranny of the city. In winter, they’d sometimes take the S-Bahn train to the Wannsee, a lake resort on the Havel River, for long lunches under the glass roof, not far from the villa where senior Nazis mapped out the Final Solution. David showed Iggy how to prep a canvas, or apply acrylic paint; both of them spent time on artwork. David completed a portrait of Iggy rendered in a convincing expressionist style reminiscent of the works they’d seen at Die Brücke, a tiny, modern museum shaded by the pine trees of the Grünewald Forest. Most of all, they’d simply walk, often dropping in on friends without warning just to say hello, like they used to back in the sixties, before most people owned a phone.
Compared to their previous existence, this was a life of monk-like restraint. But both men were realistic about their regime. Occasional excess was acceptable, but heroin, Iggy’s old bête noir, was out of bounds. One evening, David took a cab back home to the Hauptstrasse when the taxi driver mentioned he had ‘the dooj’ ready for his friend. David warned the cabbie, coldly, there would be dire consequences if any of ‘the dooj’ – heroin – should reach his friend, but didn’t mention the incident to Iggy, careful not to appear too controlling. Both men tried every brand of German beer on offer, but in the city, rather than the omnipresent American drug scene, ‘There was an artsy-crafty weekend drug culture,’ says Iggy. ‘So on the weekends we’d go meet an eccentric character who was interested in the arts, and knew other people, and maybe you’d have a little coke and get drunk and go till four in the morning to three or four clubs.’
Many locals knew who Bowie and Iggy were; but, naturally polite, they’d pretend not to recognise Bowie when they saw him in regular haunts, like the city’s two Zip record stores. Instead, fans would sneak up to the cashier once David had departed with a carrier-bag full of records, and ask, ‘Was hat Bowie gekauft?’
Visitors came and went regularly over this period, most of them staying at the Schlosshotel Gerhus. Angie was among the first, arriving soon after the completion of Low, in November 1976. It’s difficult to pinpoint, from her point of view, that point at which she realised her marriage was irrevocably doomed, but her disdain for her husband’s and his friend’s attempt to sort themselves out indicates their relationship was now poisoned by indifference and contempt. ‘A lot of people love the idea of going and making nice to the people you’ve defeated so you can treat them like slaves. That was David’s going to Berlin story: “Let me lie with you in case there’s something we didn’t take from you that I haven’t learned yet” – it’s pathetic.’ Angie’s distaste extended to Low, and The Idiot, too, her opinions echoing those of her old patron and nemesis, Tony Defries. Unsurprisingly, the Bowie family Christmas, spent in Switzerland, would be their last together. Bowie was back in Berlin by 8 January, 1977, for his thirtieth birthday, celebrated with Iggy and Romy Haag. Low was released the next week, on 14 January.
Low’s reception by both the press and Bowie’s record company was oddly in context with the record’s sleeve – the title and photo, of David in profile, made up a visual pun: Low profile. RCA’s reaction to the album was simple incomprehension. As Robin Eggar, RCA’s press officer at the time, remembers, the company ‘didn’t really know what to do with Low or “Heroes”. They only put them out because they were Bowie albums – and the attitude totally was, What are we going to do with this?’ Equally, David’s failure to promote the album meant press coverage was modest. Yet the myth that Low was greeted with widespread disdain is just that, for most reviewers realised this was a major event in Bowie’s career. Tim Lott, future Whitbread-prize winning novelist, spoke for many in declaring Low, ‘the most difficult piece of music Bowie has ever put his name to’. The writer ended his preview for Sounds with an appropriately fractured procession of adjectives, which ended:
So. This album might be
Bowie’s best ever.
Eno’s best ever.
A mechanical classic.
Lott cited ‘Sound and Vision’ as the ‘pinnacle’ of the album; his verdict anticipated its success as a single, reaching number three in the UK (but stalling at sixty-nine in the US). Its success further confused RCA, who were also, Eggar points out, intimidated by Bowie, accepting his refusal to tour the album without argument, and likewise caving in to his persuasion that the company should release Iggy’s The Idiot, which came out on 21 March, 1977. From RCA’s point of view, David’s announcement that he would tour to promote Iggy’s album, rather than his own, was perfectly consistent in its complete flouting of commercial logic. David took over all the arrangements for the tour, calling in Low guitarist Ricky Gardiner, as well as two brothers who had passed him a demo cassette during David’s first US tour, back in October 1972.
Hunt and Tony Sales were the sons of comic Soupy Sales; they’d earned their Musicians’ Union cards when drummer Hunt was twelve and bassist Tony was thirteen, hung out with Frank Sinatra, sax legend King Curtis and other hep-cats, and recorded their first album with Todd Rundgren when Hunt was just sixteen. Loud, hell-raising and formidably talented, from the moment they arrived in Berlin in February, they ensured that David and Iggy’s weekend debaucheries became seven-day affairs. Their routine normally involved a late breakfast at the Schlosshotel, rehearsals from 11 until 5, goulash for dinner, a quick sleep, then trips to Romy Haag’s, or an old bar frequented by the SS where patrons could use the phones on the table to find conversational or sexual partners, or clubs in Kreuzberg where, says Tony Sales, ‘I saw a real-life re-enactment of that Doors LP cover, with a midget with an umbrella, standing on the bar.’
In the brief, intense rehearsals at the old UFA film studios, filled with old filing cabinets crammed with film canisters and ancient Weimar and Nazi-era paperwork, through which all the band members rifled, the brothers watched the two oddly complementary singers chat, work and relax. ‘It was two schoolboys hanging out, chums,’ says Sales. ‘It was a very loving relationship in a sense. David was at a place where he needed to recharge and got behind Iggy – and in return that helped him, taking the pressure off being David Bowie.’
The brothers were among the first outsiders to see the two singers in their new hide-out. As word had leaked out in the autumn that David had holed up with the ex-leader of The Stooges, rumours had started to spread. Back in 1976, supporters like Iggy fanzine editor Harald Inhülsen were writing letters to fellow fans, speculating that David had kidnapped Iggy and was keeping him ‘under his thumb’. The implication that Iggy was being exploited as David’s sex slave was widespread, entertaining, and has made its way into print. Iggy himself laughs, and denies such hanky-panky; even Angie Bowie, always prone to seeing her husband in the role of exploiter, believes otherwise, asking, with her unerring eye for practical detail, ‘Who would be on the bottom?’
A more plausible interpretation for cynics was that Iggy’s main purpose was to give David credibility: this was probably the case with Iggy’s role at MainMan, but by the time of The Idiot, there was a selflessness to David’s behaviour that, says Hunt Sales, is rare in the jaded world of rock music. ‘David really loved him as a friend. Giving something to someone is not giving something and expecting something in return. You just give it.’
It says much for the zeal with which fans followed Bowie’s career that by the time the Iggy tour started, on 1 March, 1977, David’s absence from the public eye had become a widespread obsession. For the opening date of Iggy’s first ever solo tour, David chose the town that had hosted Ziggy’s debut performance over four years before, Aylesbury. He cheerfully greeted old acquaintances, like promoter David Stopps, jokily
enquiring, ‘What’s a clean-cut kid like you still doing in a town like this?’ and insisting the crowd not be kept outside waiting when the backline amplifiers were delayed in customs.
Kris Needs, who’d designed the flyer for the Friar’s show back in 1971, had seen Bowie in nearly all of his guises. This one was the biggest shock of them all. ‘This is a guy who roughly a year before was supposed to be out of his mind on cocaine. And here he was in sensible shoes and a jacket, maybe a flat cap like Iggy’s, just open and chatting to everyone.’
When the doors opened, it took a couple of songs before the audience noticed David Bowie, sitting at the side of the stage, playing a Baldwin electric piano. Soon, like the parting of the Red Sea, the audience split in two, as fans in the Civic Hall craned their necks to look at the keyboard player, who was studiously avoiding their gaze. Hard-core Iggy fans – like Johnny Thunders, Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock and Damned guitarist Brian James, all part of a London punk posse who’d travelled up for Iggy’s comeback – remained at stage centre. The reactions to Iggy’s new guise were mixed. Johnny Thunders was dismissive: ‘Iggy’s gone cabaret,’ he whined.
The punk movement had finally exploded into mainstream consciousness with the Sex Pistols’ appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show the previous December. Bowie’s Station to Station shows at Wembley the previous May typified the stadium rock that many punks affected to despise; even his patronage of Iggy and Lou, the twin punk figureheads, was regarded as self-serving. But few of the British punks bothered to hide the fact that they’d cut their teeth on Ziggy-era Bowie. Even if the Sex Pistols had stolen Bowie’s microphones from the Hammersmith Ziggy farewell, as claimed by guitarist Steve Jones, the theft was partly an act of affection. For those attempting to break out of punk convention, especially out of London, Bowie would be a guiding light; Manchester’s Joy Division would take The Idiot as a sonic and lyrical template, and Bowie was soon being name-checked by Echo and the Bunnymen, Cabaret Voltaire, Talking Heads and more.
In the meantime, Bowie’s low-key, stage-right role alongside Iggy was another object lesson in ‘positioning’. Soon, peers like Ray Davies and Pete Townshend would embrace the punk movement, donning skinny ties and losing a little bit of dignity. David’s slightly aloof position located him as an insider, not a follower; he was a decent keyboard player, too. But the Iggy tour was harder work than David had anticipated, keeping up with Iggy and the unstoppable Sales brothers. The latter two were phenomenal musicians – they had an almost telepathic musical bond which meant they didn’t even need to hear each other in the monitors to stay in sync – but they existed in a blaze of drink, native energy and cocaine. Bassist Tony remembers ‘walking through the hallways of hotels naked and stoned … it was over-the-top exhaustion and then you’d do more cocaine to cover the exhaustion.’
It was a mark of the new, relaxed David that his fear of flying evaporated over this tour; David boarded a 747 to New York with Andy Kent and was ‘perfectly fine’, says the photographer. But from the moment the band hit the States, the drug use and manic behaviour intensified. A wonderfully strait-laced joint appearance on The Dinah Shore Show, with David letting Iggy occupy the limelight, seemed calm, as if the pair had attained a new maturity, but backstage it was another story. Tour members remember full vodka bottles hitting the rafters in Detroit; a gun pointed at the stage in California; and a walking-talking doll with a Nazi flag marching across the Sales brothers’ dressing room. Soon Iggy was overcome by a new megalomania, and things became ‘very dark’, says bassist Tony Sales. ‘I was in real bad shape … but I could always stand up.’
David begged off from a subsequent Iggy tour, explaining, quite reasonably, ‘The drug use was unbelievable, and I knew it was killing me,’ but a few weeks after the first tour concluded in San Diego on 16 April, he threw himself into the fray again, to produce a second Iggy album. These sessions would take place at Hansa in its Köthenerstrasse location, just by the Potsdamerplatz and the Wall. By the time the recording started, says Iggy, ‘I think David was pretty sick of my rock histrionics, and I was probably pretty sick of where he was coming from, so there was a lot of friction – but on the other hand we were both really into it.’
Bowie’s production on what would become Lust for Life was, quite simply, masterful. When he heard guitarist Ricky Gardiner strumming a catchy guitar riff, he suggested Iggy use it as the basis of what became ‘The Passenger’. His own melodies, on ‘Lust for Life’ and ‘Some Weird Sin’, were powerful and muscular. During these sessions Bowie showed a rare flexibility, ready to change the schedule at any moment if Iggy, for instance, had a vocal idea he wanted to nail. Iggy describes himself as ‘the happiest person in the world’ during this period. ‘I was living on red wine, cocaine and German sausage, slept in a cot and only had a cold shower.’ (He adds that other musicians avoided him as, having only a cold shower, he never used it.)
By now, Iggy had moved into his own flat in the Hinterhof – servant’s quarters at the back of 155, Hauptstrasse – with girlfriend Esther Friedmann, and was asserting his independence. One perfect example was the song ‘Success’: dissatisfied with David’s original melody – ‘a damn crooning thing’, he called it – Iggy arrived at the studio early to record the song with a simpler, stripped-down tune, over the Sales brothers’ swinging, mid-tempo groove – ‘a controlled gallop’, says Carlos Alomar. The song, as the title suggests, proclaims that success is finally on its way; Iggy’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics – a car, a Chinese rug – were all the more poignant, as events would soon conspire to deny him the very luxuries he described in song.
Just as with The Idiot, David’s work on Lust for Life served as a dry-run for his own project, which he started almost immediately after wrapping up Iggy’s album. The centrepiece of his so-called Berlin trilogy, “Heroes” was the only album of the three entirely recorded in Berlin. The city permeated both the sound and the ambience of the album, in a location which, according to Tony Visconti, was both ‘a dream … and [a place] where everything said, “We shouldn’t be making a record here.”’
It was Hansa Studios that best embodied Berlin’s grandeur and menace. The main building, on the Köthenerstrasse, was built as the Meistersaal in 1910, a beautiful, stern clubhouse to showcase the skills of Berlin’s master masons. But in 1976, it looked like a forlorn wreck, in a forgotten sector of the city. Left derelict throughout most of the Second World War, its elegant Ionic pillars were bullet-scarred, the lofty pediment blown off, the upper windows bricked up, with pigeons roosting within; a quarter of its courtyarded block had simply collapsed. All around, streets retained their gap-toothed look, like Brixton in 1947, and from the second storey the section of the Wall leading up to Potsdamerplatz was clearly visible: ‘this was clearly an ex-war zone,’ says Visconti, ‘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.’
The tiny crew included Alomar, Dennis Davis, George Murray and Visconti, all of whom would get a taxi in from the Schlosshotel Gerhus every lunchtime. According to the producer, one factor in getting the album done quickly was that ‘David was paying my hotel bills – so he didn’t want to waste time.’ The musicians would therefore work ‘an intense eight-hour day, from 12 till 8, and then hit the Berlin clubs’, says Visconti. Brian Eno stayed at Hauptstrasse, at least some of the time. Iggy often entertained listeners with a hilarious description of Eno’s girlfriend handcuffed to a radiator, a superlative example of art-school sophistication which impressed the posterboy of rock ‘n’ roll excess, although sadly it’s doubtful Eno had the leisure time for such pursuits. Eno loved the ambience; Carlos Alomar was less impressed: ‘The hotels were, for an American, very old European, too many back staircases. My first impression of German men was that they were pigs. They ate a lot of pork, they looked a certain way and when it came to treating their women I was appa
lled … maybe it was an age thing, but the overall German experience for me was very “this sucks”.’
The difference in atmosphere between the Château and Hansa, sensed by Alomar and the rhythm section, had its effect from the moment the backing tracks went down. Last time around, the beats were funky, spritely; here, four-square rhythms give a solid, dogmatic rock feel, more evocative of Krautrock bands like Neu!. The sound was bigger, literally, for the musicians set up in the wood-floored main hall – Studio 2 – which Visconti miked up to capture an ambient zing and excitement. Working out the songs was an edgier process; the chord changes would be mapped out and endlessly altered, sometimes at random.
In those first few days, Alomar’s contribution was vital; mild, almost stately, he was supremely competitive but always remained calm when challenged to deliver. ‘The mentality that I had with David was always the same; you ask me for one thing, I will supply you with a million options until you tell me to stop. And that’s my claim to fame.’ Visconti, too, remembers Alomar’s inventiveness at crafting ‘subtle melodies, one after another – the ones people don’t notice straight away, but they make the song come together’. ‘He’s quite remarkable,’ Eno told writer Ian MacDonald later that year.
And he had to be. As early as 1967, David Bowie would arrive in the studio with a complete set of songs, all of them painstakingly mapped out on manuscript paper. A few years later, by the time of Hunky Dory, songs had arrived seemingly by magic, in a dream or on a bus ride. Now, in the culmination of a process that had begun just two years before with Station to Station, David walked into the studio without one complete song. He had completely changed the process at the heart of his music, as if he’d abandoned a conventional representational technique for a new kind of aural expressionism.