Bowie: A Biography (47 page)

“‘Re-make/ Re-model’ uncannily reminds you of all the rock songs you ever heard,” the
NME
wrote of the debut’s opening track. “Until you listen for Eno’s synthesizer.” “Editions of You,” off the follow-up, 1973’s
For Your Pleasure
, stands as evidence that only Stevie Wonder was Eno’s rival as far as expanding the scope of a classic pop track with electronic
eccentricity and vision. After parting ways with Roxy (who immediately became more of a slick affair with lead singer Bryan Ferry’s super-elegance unrivaled and unchecked by the equally personable and naturally questioning Eno), Eno released a pair of solo records that can be considered straightforward, if typically eccentric, pop, but in the wake of
Here Come the Warm Jets
and
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
, he was rapidly tiring of the standard procedures of rock ’n’ roll studio recording.
Another Green World
(1975),
Discreet Music
(1975) and
Before and After Science
(1977) are direct results of the abovementioned car accident.
Another Green World
in particular points the way to the sound Eno, Bowie and longtime producer Tony Visconti would perfect on the three Bowie records they would make together between 1976 and 1979. At their best, these records,
Low, “Heroes”
and
Lodger
, as well as much of Eno’s solo work, are marked by sturdy and masterfully structured song-writing thrown into the sonic playpen and fiddled with by precocious and gifted children. With Eno, Bowie pursued a stripping away of all learned musicianship and a return to primal, childlike innocence. Unlike many wealthy and world-famous artists, they preserved an urge to ask “Why not?” and retained a boundless enthusiasm for new toys (in this case, prototypes and rejects from the rapidly advancing synthesizer technology). Each album from both Bowie solo and Eno solo is unique. Eno’s rhythm section tends toward the jazzy and noodling (see
Another Green World’s
“Sky Saw”), whereas Bowie prefers a more smashing and dramatic drum sound and a louder, more danceable bass, but for this period, which was crucial not only to Bowie’s career, but to the progression of modern pop, or pop as “art,” the two men shared a cause. When they’d find themselves losing inspiration, Eno had devices to illuminate their path. Among these, perhaps his most famous, were the Oblique Strategies. These were aphoristic suggestions printed on cards and randomly generated and applied. These instructions (“Honor thy error as a hidden intention”) were supposed to subliminally inspire the musicians to create spontaneously and more freely. Bowie adored them.

“I’d got tired of writing in the traditional manner that I was writing in while I was in America,” Bowie recalled in 1978 (while in the midst of his Eno period), “and coming back to Europe I took a look at what I was
writing and the environments I was writing about and decided I had to start writing in terms of trying to find a new musical language for myself to write in. I needed somebody to help with that because I was a bit lost and too subjective about it all.”

Bowie, Visconti and Eno even chucked out the traditional approach to recording an album, even more remarkable given the back-to-back commercial success of both
Young Americans
and
Station to Station
. Given the support that RCA threw behind Bowie during the split with Defries, Bowie might have felt obliged to deliver a third big hit and further solidify his status. Instead, he threw out the model and any schedule and decamped to France to see what would happen. Musicians now do this all the time. A band like Radiohead will routinely bunker for two or three years, recording bits and pieces of ideas from rehearsals or jams or experimentation among its individual members. In 1976, this was unheard of. Artists turned in records in time to be released for holidays and summers. “The three of us agreed to record with no promise that [the new album] would ever be released,” Visconti wrote of the sessions for Bowie’s follow-up to
Station to Station
. “David had asked me if I didn’t mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment; if it didn’t go well, hey, we were in a French château for the month of September and the weather was great.”

Life in the Château was, in its way, a return to the Arts Lab for Bowie, a shift back to art by the eternally metronomic art vs. commerce swing. It was highly glamorous hippie-style living. For the most part, RCA left him alone, a decision they would soon come to regret. Bowie was committed to the process, sensing that it was a key to his future, and so he placed himself far from any shortsighted influences for the time being, knowing full well that they would eventually weigh in. The inevitable scolding he knew he would receive only made the experimentation that much more satisfying.

“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.

T

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
.