by Pat Gilbert
In March, Bowie moved to Los Angeles, his soul credentials by then deemed impressive enough to present Aretha Franklin with Best Female Soul Singer at the Grammy Awards, though, much to his displeasure, she teased him for looking so ghastly. Afterward he hung out again with Lennon, photos of the occasion later shocking the singer—“I’m just a skeleton,” he mused. But his fans hungrily embraced his new look and radical excursion into “plastic soul” music. When Young Americans—with a cover portrait of Bowie taken the previous summer, moodily smoking a cigarette—was released on March 7, it climbed to No. 2 in the UK and No. 9 in the United States.
Bowie, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and Roberta Flack backstage at the 17th Annual Grammy Awards, March 1, 1975.
This time, though, there would be no tour to promote the album, which for fans in Britain (where he hadn’t played live since Ziggy took his last bow at Hammersmith Odeon two years earlier) made him seem an even more mysterious and remote character. Instead, Bowie took a film role that would consume him for the next four months and take adjectives used to described him such as “mysterious” and “remote” to new levels of intensity. The movie in question was The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, and the director Nicolas Roeg, the British filmmaker who in 1968 made Performance, the cult acid-gangster movie starring Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg. The idea of casting Bowie in the lead role of Thomas Newton, a visitor from space in search of water for his dying planet, came from Jagger’s film agent Maggie Abbott after Jagger himself was considered, then rejected, for the part. Abbott had seen Cracked Actor when it was screened on British television in January 1975 and immediately understood how Bowie could bring the necessary otherworldly magic to the role.
A poster advertising the cinematic release of The Man Who Fell to Earth in March 1976.
Bowie, meanwhile, was thrilled to revive the film acting ambitions he’d nursed since his bit part in The Virgin Soldiers half a decade earlier. Yet his life in Los Angeles that spring plummeted into a druggy daze, his only creative activity an aborted recording session in May with Iggy Pop, who was in no better shape than Bowie. The two men had last met when Bowie had visited the Stooges frontman in an L.A. psychiatric hospital six months earlier, offering the patient a snort of cocaine as a get-well gift.
It was miraculous, then, that the eleven-week shoot that commenced in New Mexico in June passed without incident and, indeed, saw Bowie produce arguably his best-ever onscreen performance. Before filming began, Bowie had assured Roeg that he would steer clear of drugs, but later the singer claimed he was stoned throughout the process. If this was case, it certainly didn’t harm his ability to learn his lines—one crew member recalled him being consistently word-perfect—or endure five hours in makeup for the scenes where he appeared in his natural alien form. Bowie regarded his detached performance as Newton as “not having to act,” which to some extent may have been true, yet the way he moved and spoke onscreen was never less than compelling and convincing. As an emotionally remote alien who learns to enjoy the earthly pleasures of sex, booze, and ping-pong, he has yet to be bettered.
When he wasn’t required on set, Bowie hung out with Geoff MacCormack, Coco Schwab, and his driver Tony Mascia, who appears in a cameo role as Newton’s chauffeur. Besides UFO-spotting, he whiled away the downtime on location reading, painting, and writing a volume of short stories called The Return of the Thin White Duke. In many ways, of course, Newton and Bowie were the same thing—addicts who didn’t fit into the conventional world, consummate actors, victims of external and internal forces they are unable to escape—so perhaps it was no surprise that when filming was finished, Bowie retained Newton’s mannerisms, together with his slicked-back, red-and-blond hairstyle and beautifully tailored clothes, designed by Ola Hudson, mother of an eleven-year-old boy who’d one day grow up to be Slash from Guns ’N’ Roses.
Bowie and director Nicolas Roeg in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth.
A still from The Man Who Fell to Earth showing Bowie (as Thomas Jerome Newton) surrounded by television screens.
The single “Fame,” Bowie’s duet with John Lennon, gave him his first US No. 1.
Back in Los Angeles, it didn’t take long for Bowie to fall back into a world of drug dealers and leeches. It was also a period when his obsession with the occult became as all-consuming as the cocaine and speed he was ingesting in huge quantities. Before he’d left to film The Man Who Fell to Earth, a seventeen-year-old Cameron Crowe had interviewed him for Rolling Stone and lapped up stories involving witches, demons, and exorcisms. He noticed the blinds in Bowie’s house were marked with runic symbols designed to ward off evil spirits. Aleister Crowley, namechecked in “Quicksand,” was no longer a hip reference but an object of genuine fascination, his belief in “magick” as a third path between science and religion touching a nerve with the singer. By the time he’d returned to Los Angeles after filming, Bowie’s interests had also widened to include the Judaic mystical teachings of the Kabbalah and the work of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi archaeologists devoted to the search for the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant, a subject explored in another text he devoured, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny. Bowie would also spend hours glued to videos of old Nazi films, watching them repeatedly, high as a kite.
A few months after “Fame” topped the US singles chart, a UK reissue of “Space Oddity” became Bowie’s first British No. 1.
In August, Coco Schwab had found a rented house for the singer at 1349 Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air, a secluded 1950s-built property with a mock Egyptian interior. From here, Bowie pulled together a team to record his next album, for which he had only a couple of sketchy ideas. Harry Maslin, who’d worked on the “Across the Universe”/“Fame” session in New York, was recruited as producer, while Carlos Alomar, Earl Slick, and Dennis Davis were joined by bassist George Murray to form the core of the group. Mike Garson, who according to Bowie was “off being a Scientologist” somewhere, was replaced by the E-Street Band’s pianist Roy Bittan. Warren Peace was also hired to help with Bowie’s vocals.
After two weeks of rehearsals, the group entered Cherokee Studios in Hollywood. Confidence was high: a few weeks before, “Fame” had gifted Bowie with his first No. 1 single on the Billboard charts. Adding to the positive vibes was the knowledge that, though he’d paid the price for severing his ties with MainMan, Bowie was no longer an employee of Defries, nor did he have to worry where his earnings were being spent. The jamming began, with Bowie promoting a spirit of “experimentation.” One of the first songs to emerge was “Golden Years,” a sinuous soul groove that took up where Young Americans had left off. It was premiered on November 4 on ABC TV’s Soul Train, a compliment indeed on Bowie’s kudos within the soul community. Ever the perfectionist, with the aid of cocaine and amphetamines, Bowie no longer needed to leave the studio or, indeed, sleep. The drugs focused him to the extent that one session lasted twenty-six hours, at which point he was asked to leave the studio, as it had been booked by another artist. On a roll, Bowie simply moved the whole operation to the L.A. Record Plant nearby, and within a few hours they had resumed work on the track they were recording. After such superhuman bursts of activity, lasting three of four days, he’d then return to Stone Canyon Drive to rest. Surviving on a diet of milk and cocaine, with the odd vegetable thrown in, he outwardly seemed surprisingly healthy. Interviewed in November for the British TV show Russell Harty Plus Pop via a satellite link, he looked immaculate with his streaked Newton hair and possessed a deadpan humor and wit that effortlessly outsmarted his chummy host.
Bowie clutches a carton of milk outside Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles, late 1975.
At the mixing desk during the Station to Station sessions, Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles, 1975.
A promotional portrait of Bowie—glass of milk in hand—taken ahead of the release of Station to Station.
The first taste of Station to Station, “
Golden Years” (above) hit the US Top 10 on its release in November 1975. The album’s second single, “TVC15,” was a minor UK hit the following April (below).
Though only six songs emerged from these sessions, they amounted to some of Bowie’s finest work. The title of the book of short stories he’d begun during The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Return of The Thin White Duke, made its way into the opening line of “Station to Station,” an epic eleven-minute piece that moved through a series of moods—sometimes dark, melancholy, and mysterious, elsewhere funky and euphoric—with allusions to the Kabbalah, cocaine, and, in its title, the Stations of the Cross, the popular representation of Christ journeying toward his crucifixion. In comparison, the beautiful “Word on a Wing” appeared to explore a more conventional Christian, or perhaps Buddhist, theme; “Stay” was a trippy funk-out with soaring psychedelic soul guitar; and “TVC 15” was a curious but catchy fusion of New Orleans piano and futuristic soul, telling the tale of a woman devoured by a television set. The final track, a cover of “Wild Is the Wind,” the 1954 film theme memorably covered by Nina Simone in 1966, ended the album in a magnificently contemplative and dramatic style, completing a record exuding strangeness and imbued with layers of mystery. Bowie, however, later admitted he had few recollections of recording it, bar shouting his idea for a feedback part to Earl Slick.
Station to Station, as it was titled, captured Bowie in transition between American soul music and an art-rock aesthetic incorporating a new style of music being created in Europe: so-called “krautrock.” Shades of the German groups Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk could be heard in the pulsing introduction to “Station to Station,” which prophetically talked of the “European canon,” a body of art that suddenly seemed vital again after his excursion into black soul and funk. As soon as the album was finished, Bowie went back into Cherokee to record material for the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth, this time with multi-instrumentalist Paul Buckmaster, who’d played on Space Oddity, and pianist J. Peter Robinson. The group set to work using drum machines and synths to create mood pieces and mid-tempo rock instrumentals, but when the producers asked the singer to “submit” his work for scrutiny, he was so offended he told them he was keeping the recordings for himself. At the end of the sessions, exhausted after two years of relentless drug abuse, Bowie collapsed on the studio floor. Buckmaster would admit in 2006 that, even though it was amazing, Bowie’s score “wasn’t really what Nic Roeg was looking for,” and the soundtrack job was passed on to John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
Bowie’s tenth studio album in as many years, Station to Station, and the first of two albums to feature a still from The Man Who Fell to Earth on its cover.
A pensive portrait of Bowie as the Thin White Duke, taken shortly before the release of Station to Station.
A poster and program for the Station to Station / Isolar—1976 tour, which kicked off in Vancouver on February 2, 1976.
The rejection of the Bowie’s score for The Man Who Fell to Earth was an unsettling end to an extraordinarily fertile year for Bowie, but there was more drama to come at Christmas. Unhappy with their relationship, Bowie unexpectedly sacked Michael Lippman, the lawyer who had become his manager after engineering Defries’s departure. Locked away in his home on Stone Canyon Road, Bowie made the decision to take control of his life, starting with his drug addiction. The Bowie who emerged in January 1975 employed a personal trainer, was eating more healthily, and had scaled down his hedonistic habits dramatically. Some claim he even had even acquired a light suntan, though meeting him a few months later, the Daily Mail was nonetheless moved to comment he looked “terribly ill. Thin as a stick insect. And corpse pale.” The immediate reason for Bowie’s new, comparatively clean-living act was that, after a year without touring, he was set to return to the road with one of his greatest-ever bands, one capable of blending all his diverse musical styles into a seamless, powerful new kind of rock.
Bowie onstage at the Olympia Stadium, Detroit, Michigan, February 29, 1976.
Even the location of the rehearsals for the Station to Station tour signaled a salubrious change of scene. In January, Bowie summoned the core of his new studio band—Alomar, Murray, and Davis, plus Yes’s keyboard player Tony Kaye—to Keith Richards’s studio in the hills above Ocho Rios in Jamaica. Conspicuously absent was Earl Slick, who’d been caught in the crossfire between Bowie and Lippman, the manager having secured the guitarist a record deal with Capitol and unwittingly creating a conflict of interests. Slick’s replacement was Stacey Heydon, a twenty-one-year-old who’d received a call at his girlfriend’s apartment from Bowie’s management, asking him to fly to Jamaica. (So fanciful was the idea that Bowie should contact him that his girlfriend hung up on the caller the first time they rang.) With only twenty-four hours’ notice, Heydon had no time to learn any of Bowie’s songs but nevertheless received the nod of approval after auditioning for forty-five minutes in what he described as “a pretty elaborate set-up at the top of this mountain.”
The tour kicked off on February 2, 1976, at Vancouver’s PNE Coliseum, where the audience witnessed a show that couldn’t have contrasted more starkly with the mechanized extravaganza of the Diamond Dogs tour two years before. This time, the drama flowed from the bare black set, imaginatively lit with banks of white lights, and from Bowie’s new stage persona, the Thin White Duke, whose wardrobe would settle into a monochrome vision of a Weimar cabaret artist—black trousers and waistcoat, crisp white shirt, and hair slicked back to his head. The austere European flavor of his image was underscored by the warmup tape, featuring Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity and a screening of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s classic Dadaist film Un Chien Andalou (in which an eyeball is dissected with a razorblade).
Along for the ride, though he never appeared on stage, was Iggy Pop. In the months since Bowie had visited him in hospital, Iggy had discharged himself and was sleeping rough. A mutual friend, Freddie Sessler, a concentration camp survivor and purveyor of fine pharmaceutical cocaine, had suggested he get in touch with Bowie, and a reunion took place in San Diego in January 1974. Almost immediately, Bowie floated the idea of making another album with the former Stooge, thus delivering him from a life as a bum. The two men got along so well that Bowie invited Iggy to accompany him throughout the Station to Station tour, making a pact that both would say away from hard drugs. The fact they stuck to their promise was borne out after a show at Rochester on March 20, when police busted Bowie, Iggy, and two friends at the Flagship American Hotel and found only a small amount of marijuana. The charges were dropped, but the irony of Bowie’s only drug arrest being for weed wasn’t lost on the touring party. What the singer or his friends couldn’t know at the time, though, was how breathtakingly cool Bowie looked in his police mugshots—flawless skin, chiseled jaw, perfectly combed hair—a fact that came to light thanks to copies of the photos appearing for sale on the Internet in 2007.
The police mug shot of Bowie taken following his arrest on drug charges in Rochester, New York, on March 25, 1976.
When the tour passed through Los Angeles, Bowie took the opportunity to pack up his rented house on Stone Canyon Road. At the after-party for one of the Inglewood Forum shows, the singer was introduced to Christopher Isherwood, then seventy-one, whose novel Goodbye to Berlin, based on his experience in prewar Germany, had been the inspiration for the musical and film Cabaret. It was while conversing with the novelist that Bowie first seriously considered the idea of moving to modern West Berlin, since 1945 an isolated Western enclave behind the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, the rest of the North American leg of the tour continued attract rave reviews, and on hearing the Live Nassau Coliseum recording, an extra with the deluxe 2010 reissue of Station to Station, it’s obvious why. Funky but also fluid and tough, the versions of new material (“Station to Station,” “Word on a Wing,” “Stay”) and old (“Queen Bitch,” “Five Years,” “Rebel Rebel”) worked together as a sensuous, stunning whole.
At the end of March, Bowie set sail with Schwab from New York to France, for what, unbelievably, would be his first-ever major concerts in mainland Europe. In Paris, he met his publisher at Chrysalis, Bob Grace, who asked how he’d managed to kick his coke habit. “I took that image off,” he explained. “I put it in a wardrobe in an LA hotel room and locked the door.” The tour began at Munich on April 7 and landed in Berlin three days later. After the performance at the Deutschlandhalle, he met Romy Haag, a fabulously beautiful transsexual who personified everything decadent and alluring about decaying 1970s Berlin and had opened the outré Chez Romy nightclub two years earlier. The two struck up an instant friendship, which would help convince Bowie that he’d found his new home.
After a show in Zurich, Switzerland, Bowie arranged a trip to Moscow to fill the week-long break before he was due to perform in Helsinki. With a small entourage including Iggy and Schwab, the singer journeyed by rail through Poland, marveling at the bleak beauty of the landscape still scarred by the Soviet Army’s advance at the end of the war. Traveling on tourist visas, the party had no idea that they were being closely scrutinized until they were met by the KGB at the Russian border, which searched their belongings and confiscated several books Bowie was reading on the Third Reich. The visit to Moscow lasted only a few hours before they took a train to Helsinki.