Bowie

by Pat Gilbert

  Bowie gives a wave—interpreted by some to be a Nazi salute—from an open-top Mercedes at Victoria Station, London, May 2, 1976.

  The shows were a huge success, and the outpouring of affection for the once-distant star was overwhelming. But when Bowie made his dramatic arrival in London on May 2, the mood was suddenly to turn darker. While in Stockholm, Bowie had given an interview to a journalist in which he’d said, “I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.” The comment followed dubious remarks he’d made to Cameron Crowe that had been printed earlier that year, including the claim, “I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.” He’d also likened Hitler’s rallies to “a rock ‘n’ roll concert.” In truth, there was little in the singer’s quips to substantiate, or even suggest, he was a neo-Nazi, though an enduring fascination with the iconography and sinister magnetism of mid-century totalitarian regimes was patently clear.

  Naturally, the British press chose to ignore any subtle nuances and concluded that Bowie was a Nazi. The matter exploded as soon as he arrived at London’s Victoria Station, and he didn’t help his cause much by standing in his touring vehicle, a black open-top Mercedes-Benz, looking suitably Teutonic and raising his arm to the crowd. Some primitive retouching to tidy up one picture resulted in what appeared to be a Nazi salute (though film footage shows it most certainly wasn’t), supplying the press with all the ammunition it needed to crucify him as crypto-Fascist. Bowie reacted to the furor with genuine hurt, though it was also the wake-up call that stunned him into the realization that he was toying with dark forces. “It upsets me,” he told Jean Rook of The Express. “Sinister I am not. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre.”

  Keyboard player Tony Kaye, Bowie, and guitarist Carlos Alomar during the first of six triumphant nights at the Empire Pool, Wembley, London, May 3, 1976.

  Iggy Pop’s Bowie-produced solo debut, The Idiot—a dry run for some of the ideas Bowie would explore on his own Low.

  The audiences at London’s Wembley Empire Pool arena had no doubts about the brilliance of the “theater” in question and gave Bowie an ecstatic homecoming reception over the six shows. It was then back to Brussels and Rotterdam before the tour wound up in Paris. With Station to Station now his biggest-selling album yet, reaching No. 3 in the United States and No. 5 in the UK and selling well throughout Europe, Bowie made good on his promise to record Iggy’s next album. Bowie’s original choice of location was Munich, but after a brief sojourn at Château d’Hérouville, where Bowie had made Pin Ups three years prior, it was decided to use the facility there. First, though, the singer visited the Swiss chateau Angie had found at Clos des Mésanges near Lausanne, which he didn’t much care for, perhaps because it reminded him that he was still married though the couple had by now been living apart for almost two years.

  Bowie returned to Paris and began work with Iggy on what would become The Idiot, starting with “Sister Midnight,” a song he’d written with Carlos Alomar back in February and played to Iggy at the start of the tour. The rest of the material was fashioned in the studio with Bowie crafting most of the music and Iggy penning the lyrics, while the facility’s manager Laurent “Tibo” Thibault added bass and Frenchman Michel Santangeli drums. Inspired by his European adventures and his interest in synthesizers, krautrock, and Brian Eno, The Idiot saw Bowie take yet another sonic left turn, this time into punk electronica—as if the Stooges in 1969 had discovered atmospheric guitar effects and synths. After the group moved the operation to Musicland Studios in Munich, the album was finished at Hansa Studio 1 in Berlin, with Alomar, Murray, and Davis overdubbing parts and producer Visconti, in his words, doing a “salvage job” on the tapes. Among the standout tracks were the classics “Nightclubbing” and “China Girl,” both destined for bigger things at the hands of Grace Jones and Bowie in his 1980s pop period. “China Girl” was written about Iggy’s brief relationship with Kuelan Nguyan, a Vietnamese woman staying at the Château, who would indeed tell the excitable Stooge to “Shhh… shut your mouth” and in general add to the atmosphere at d’Hérouville.

  Bowie—who’d by now taken to smoking a briar pipe—was so knocked out by the album he decided to take its avant-garde electronic aesthetic and create his own record in that vein, putting his friend’s album on ice to make it clear to the outside world who exactly was behind this exciting new sound. The era of Bowie’s so-called “Berlin Trilogy” was underway.

  CHAPTER 6

  1977–1979

  Subterraneans

  Back in 1972, when Bowie, as Ziggy Stardust, performed at London’s Rainbow Theatre, the support act was a new Island Records signing called Roxy Music. The story goes that Bowie wasn’t overly thrilled by the arty, avant-garde glam-rock act’s sudden success in the weeks leading up to the concerts and made a point of not speaking to them. But four years later, Bowie had become deeply curious about the solo career of its keyboard player Brian Eno, a musician who espoused a consciously theoretical approach to music over a practical one. Together with Berlin-born, British-raised artist Peter Schmidt, Eno had devised a pack of cards called Oblique Strategies, designed to help artists overcome writer’s block and think laterally, with instructions such as, “What would your closest friend do?” or “Use an old idea.” Just as intriguing for Bowie were Eno’s latest albums, Another Green World and Discreet Music, which pioneered ambient electronic music and aimed to blend sound with environment so music didn’t necessarily have the primary function of catching your attention.

  Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

  After one of Bowie’s Station to Station shows at Wembley’s Empire Pool, the two men had fallen into a deep conversation, continued later that night at the house in Maida Vale where the singer was staying. Both admitted an admiration for the other’s records, with Bowie revealing that the beautiful, palliating sounds of Discreet Music had been a constant companion while he and Iggy had been traveling across the United States and Europe. In the subsequent weeks, while Bowie was toiling away on The Idiot at Château d’Hérouville, he and Eno would enjoy long phone conversations about what music was and how it might be fashioned anew, which resulted in Bowie inviting the ex-Roxy conceptualist to contribute to his next album.

  Former Roxy Music multi-instrumentalist Brian Eno, photographed in 1976, shortly before he joined Bowie at the Chateau d’Herouville to begin work on Low.

  By the time Eno arrived at Château d’Hérouville, where Bowie had booked his own session in September, the musicians he’d assembled were already hard at work. Joining the Alomar-Murray-Davis core were Tony Visconti, veteran British rock ’n’ roll pianist Roy Young, and guitarist Ricky Gardiner of prog rockers Beggars Opera. (Tellingly, Bowie’s original choice of guitarist was Neu!’s Klaus Dinger, but he declined.) Gardiner was Visconti’s find, having impressed the producer with his mastery of effects pedals, while Young had to be tracked down to the bar of the Speakeasy Club in London. Sharing the same flight to Paris, Gardiner and Young polished off two bottles of spirits on the plane and were so drunk by the time they landed that they failed to find with Coco Schwab, who’d been dispatched to collect them.

  The first days of the session before Eno arrived were willfully experimental and relied on the group cooking up riffs and passages of music from an idea or snatch of lyric that Bowie gave them. Alomar described their jobs as “plucking [the music] from the air.” With Eno present, the unusual texture of the album began to take shape. The array of instruments that he and Bowie are credited as playing include ARP (an early synthesizer), Splinter mini-moog, “tape,” “ambient sounds,” and Chamberlin, an early electronic keyboard. By now only an occasional cocaine user, Bowie had instead developed an occasional thirst for strong alcohol. At one session, he asked Young to mix him gin and tonics from the pianist’s supply kept under the piano; later, while Bowie was sitting lotus-like in the control room, listening to a playback, the others realized h
e’d passed out.

  Among the songs to emerge prior to Eno’s appearance were “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” whose lyric paid homage to the beaten-up black Mercedes the singer was now attempting to sell, and “Sound and Vision,” a smooth, undulating pop number that skillfully mixed soul, funk, and the crystalline, synthesized krautrock sounds emanating from Germany. Immediately after the backing track of the latter was nailed, Bowie rushed out of the control booth and sang the vocal part in its entirety. With the addition of backing vocals from Visconti’s wife, singer Mary Hopkin, the song was complete. Another new number, “Breaking Glass,” was inspired by Angie’s unexpected visit to the Château with her new boyfriend Roy Martin. On the couple’s arrival, Bowie suddenly became elusive, and when Martin sought out the singer to introduce himself, a noisy contretemps ensued behind closed doors. The tension between Bowie and Angie created a strained atmosphere, which made “Be My Wife”—a touchingly romantic entreaty from a lonely soul to his spouse—a curious track to emerge from the sessions. Estranged for two years, that autumn Bowie and Angie drifted away from each other for good.

  Brothers in arms: Bowie and Iggy share a joke during the tour in support of The Idiot.

  Bowie’s tendency at this time to fall into depression was reflected by Low’s title, suggesting the singer wasn’t finding the escape from cocaine addiction nor the retreat from the fantasy worlds of his alter egos easy. Compounding his anxieties were the continuing legal ructions with his ex-manager Michael Lippman, whose representatives met the singer in Paris to try to tie up a severance deal. A conclusion to the negotiations was imperative, as Bowie’s income from record sales and royalties had been frozen—in fact, the first check he’d written to pay for The Idiot sessions had bounced. The Château itself didn’t lighten the mood either; Eno was certain the building was haunted and that he could feel the ghostly manifestation of previous famous occupants Frédéric Chopin and George Sand. There were also rumors of late-night Ouija sessions to try to contact those spirits and others. Back in the corporeal world, there were also clashes between Visconti and studio manager Thibault.

  Eno’s presence at the Château had its own dramatic effect. He had traveled to the sessions directly from Germany, where he’d been working with Harmonia, a group comprising Neu!’s Michael Rother and Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Möbius. Tapes of this collaboration didn’t surface until 1997, when they were released as Tracks and Traces, revealing a dreamlike affair with only one track featuring vocals. It was already Bowie’s intention that Low should be a partly instrumental album, and after he played Eno and Visconti his abandoned The Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack, the focus quickly switched to creating a series of evocative soundscapes. One of the tracks from Bowie’s score became the basis of “Subterraneans,” Low’s bleak, jazzy final track, on which Eno played his latest futuristic device, an EMS AKS suitcase synth. Their work done, Murray and Davis returned to the States, though not before Visconti had applied his state-of-the-art Eventide Harmonizer to Davis’s snare drum, modulating its pitch without affecting the beat. Another instrumental, the funereal “Warszawa,” grew from a series of notes Visconti’s son had picked out on a keyboard and was shaped by Bowie to evoke the bleak train journey he’d taken through the Eastern Bloc with Iggy a few months earlier. Eno suggested adding a chant inspired by a recording he owned of a Balkan boys’ choir.

  Toward the end of September, when the album still carried the rather ostentatious working title New Music: Night and Day, Bowie, Iggy, Visconti, and Eno relocated to West Berlin, first staying in the Schlosshotel Gerhus and then taking a large apartment at 155 Hauptstrasse, an anonymous thoroughfare in the Schöneberg district of the city. Work resumed at Hansa 1 studio, where two new instrumentals were recorded, “Art Decade,” on which the studio engineer Eduard Meyer added cello, and “Weeping Wall,” a piece influenced by minimalist composer Philip Glass’s use of repetitive phrasing, featuring Bowie playing every instrument himself.

  Both “Art Decade” and “Weeping Wall” were hymns to a city in which Bowie immediately felt at home. For the first time in five years, he could walk the streets virtually unmolested and blend into the day-to-day life of Berliners without being paid special attention. “The whole reason for going there was because it was so low-key,” he told Q magazine’s Adrian Deevoy in 1989. “Jim [Iggy Pop] and I—we were both having the same problems—I knew it was the kind of place where you walk around and really are left alone. They’re very blasé there. Cynical, irony-based people, and it’s a great place to do some soul-searching and find out what it is that you really want.” Bowie had started to paint, a discipline he’d first briefly returned to during the filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth, and stopped dyeing his hair, which Visconti had cut short. His quest for anonymity also manifested itself in his dress sense: his deathly Thin White Duke image was replaced by the antistyle of blue jeans and a checked shirt, topped off with a rakish flat cap, though he still managed to look effortlessly cool.

  Hansa Tonstudios Meistersaal, the former concert hall where Bowie and producer Tony Visconti put the finishing touches to Low.

  “Art Decade” and “Weeping Wall” showed that Berlin stimulated Bowie in an unusual way, drawing out the bouts of sadness and despair that attended his recovery. Germany’s history of expressionist art was, for him, a big part of the city’s attraction, and he regularly viewed the collection of paintings by the Die Brücke group—Kirchner, Bleyl, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Heckel—displayed in a specially built museum in Berlin’s western suburbs. But what really captured Bowie’s imagination was the extraordinary nature of the city itself: located deep inside Communist territory, by the late 1970s West Berlin was depopulated, forgotten, economically depressed, and decaying, only existing because the West had resolved never to surrender it to the GDR. For Bowie, it was the perfect place for self-exile—and creating a new kind of existential music, with the Wall and its armed watchtower guards a constant reminder that the Cold War was very real and that life was a game of chance.

  Like its predecessor, Station to Station, Low featured a still from The Man Who Fell to Earth on its sleeve.

  By November, Low was finished, with the final touches added at Hansa 2, a larger facility at Potsdamer Platz incorporating the Meistersaal, an elegant pre–World War I concert hall. The Meistersaal had an intriguing history, spanning its original use for chamber music recitals to a more sinister life as the location for Nazi dances to its postwar period as a venue for down-at-heel cabaret performances. When the Wall was erected in 1961, it passed directly behind the building, earning it the nickname “the hall by the Wall” when artists began using the facility in the 1970s.

  Today, Low is regarded as one of Bowie’s masterpieces and a crucial staging post in his development as an artist, but RCA’s reaction to it was one of horror. Quite why the singer had chosen to make a half-instrumental album was lost on the company, as was the stately, sorrowful tone of much of the music. It was decided that the album should be bumped from the competitive Christmas schedule and instead be released in January, traditionally when less commercial or “difficult” albums appeared. Some sources state that Tony Defries, who still earned royalties from Bowie’s releases, took steps to prevent the album from coming out at all, petitioning RCA to demand a more accessible record.

  Ensconced in Berlin, Bowie refused to listen to the naysayers and prepared the cover artwork—as with Station to Station, a still of him taken on the set of The Man Who Fell to Earth. The use of an image that was now eighteen months old may have been construed as odd, but for Bowie it was making a point. Though he had conceded that the finished The Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack complemented the onscreen story—it was pieced together from recordings by old artists such as Jim Reeves, Louis Armstrong, and Artie Shaw, plus John Phillips’s and Stomu Yamashta’s original material—he felt that Low represented what he’d been striving for but, in his coke-addled state, was unable to deliver. He sent a copy to Nic
Roeg with a note that read, “This is what I wanted to do for the soundtrack.” Roeg was deeply impressed, though some critics weren’t so taken with Bowie’s move into electronica. In NME, Charles Shaar Murray wrote that the album “stinks of artfully counterfeited spiritual defeat and emptiness.” Nevertheless, fanfared by the peerless “Sound and Vision,” Low’s highly personal fusion of soul, rock, and electronica was lapped up by fans, and despite little promotion, it made No. 2 on the UK charts and No. 11 in the States. Soon it would become the chief inspiration for the explosion of synth bands appearing in punk’s wake.

  In later years, Bowie would talk about Low in terms of “therapy,” coinciding with his retreat from a rock-star lifestyle. Significantly, the album came out in January 1977, the same month the singer celebrated his thirtieth birthday in a Paris nightclub with Iggy, Schwab, and Romy Haag. Bowie could no longer pretend to be a young upstart, though compared with his peers—the Kinks, the Who, and the Stones—there was still something eternally youthful about him and his mission to continually challenge himself and his audience. And, in contrast to some of his 1960s contemporaries, his drug years had left few outward scars.

  Berlin had revitalized Bowie artistically, but it also showed him that living quietly suited him, a realization that influenced his next move. In March 1977, Iggy Pop’s The Idiot was released on RCA, and Bowie hatched a plan to help his friend promote it while still remaining resolutely in the shadows. The idea was simple: he would become the keyboard player in Iggy’s band. RCA was understandably confused that Bowie was electing to publicize Iggy’s record over his own, but the singer argued he wasn’t ready to headline his own dates and knuckled down to organizing Iggy’s tour. Rehearsals began in February at Berlin’s UFA film studios, with Bowie putting together a group featuring Hunt and Tony Sales, the sons of comedian and Rat Pack associate Soupy Sales, who had been playing (drums and bass, respectively) in Todd Rundgren’s band, and Low guitarist Ricky Gardiner.