David Bowie's Low (6 page)

The Idiot
also finds Iggy Pop straining towards other idioms, experimenting with his voice: “To work with [Bowie] as a producer …he was a pain in the ass—megalomaniacal, loco! But he had good ideas. The best example I can give you was when I was working on the lyrics to ‘Funtime’ and he said, ‘Yeah, the words are good. But don’t sing it like a rock guy. Sing it like Mae West.’ Which made it informed of other genres, like cinema. Also, it was a little bit gay. The vocals there became more menacing as a result of that suggestion.”

Iggy’s catatonic, lugubrious croon—like a drugged-up Frank Sinatra—is one of the signatures of the album. As on
Station to Station
, the crooning comes over as a form of alienated
male hysteria. The emotionally skewed quality of the album is apparent right from the first track, the superb “Sister Midnight.” A funk bass and riff play against dirty, dissonant guitars, while Iggy Pop’s basso profundo contrasts weirdly with Bowie’s falsetto yelps. The lyrics set the tormented, psychiatric tone of the album, as Iggy recounts a dream in which “Mother was in my bed, and I made love to her/Father he gunned for me, hunted me with his six-gun.”

There’s a relentlessly disturbing feel to the album that would be too much to take if it weren’t for the camp touches and stabs of dark humour scattered across most of the tracks. The autistic worldview of
Low
is one in which relationships are an impossibility; on
The Idiot
, relationships are not only possible, they’re a mutually destructive addiction. Songs kick off with a vision of happy codependence, only to sink into rupture and depression or violence. “China Girl” (reprised by Bowie six years later as a cheesy pop song, but excellent here) uses the analogy of East and West, as Iggy corrupts his oriental lover with “television, eyes of blue” and “men who want to rule the world.” (The song also alludes to Bowie’s messianic delusions: “I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow, visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone.”) Even the jokey, cabaret-style “Tiny Girls” (a risqué title given Iggy Pop’s sexual proclivities of the time) ends with the sour message of a world where even the “girls who have got no tricks” ultimately “sing of greed, like a young banshee.” Relationships are power struggles in
which lies and deception are the weapons, and the strong crush the weak.

There’s misogyny, but also plenty of self-hate in there too—in fact it’s pretty much the sort of album you’d expect two junkies running away from deteriorating relationships might make. But the songs are mostly leavened with irony and humorous touches. The exception is the eight and half minutes of the final track—nothing on the rest of the album matches the sheer nihilism of “Mass Production.” (Eno described listening to the album as akin to sticking your head in concrete, which is not true at all, except perhaps for this one track.) Crunching, industrial synth sounds fight distorted guitars over the genocidal imagery of “smokestacks belching, breasts turn brown.” Iggy Pop croons against the backdrop of suicide (“although I try to die, you put me back on the line”), begging the lover who thanklessly saved him to “give me the number of a girl almost like you,” since “I’m almost like him.” The estrangement from the self is now complete, and the song collapses in a morass of detuned synthesisers and grinding noise.

Bowie’s stylistic
imprimatur
is all over the album. Even the title’s literary allusion is more Bowie than Pop. The cover is a black-and-white shot of Iggy Pop in a karate-style pose inspired by the painting
Roquairol
by the German Expressionist painter Erich Heckel—a Bowie-esque reference. Not only did Bowie write most of the music, he also suggested song subjects and titles, and generally kick-started Iggy’s
imagination. For “Dum Dum Boys,” “I only had a few notes on the piano, I couldn’t quite finish the tune,” Iggy Pop recounted later. “Bowie said, ‘Don’t you think you could do something with that? Why don’t you tell the story of the Stooges?’ He gave me the concept of the song and he also gave me the title. Then he added that guitar arpeggio that metal groups love today. He played it, and then he asked Phil Palmer to play the tune again because he didn’t find his playing technically proficient enough.” The danger of the album being perceived as Bowie’s was something Iggy Pop was well aware of, and shaped his work on their following collaboration,
Lust for Life:
“The band and Bowie would leave the studio and go to sleep, but not me. I was working to be one step ahead of them for the next day … See, Bowie’s a hell of a fast guy. Very quick thinker, quick action, very active person, very sharp. I realised I had to be quicker than him, otherwise whose album was it going to be?”

And yet, the influence was definitely not just a one-way street. The harsher, messier guitar sound is something that infused
Low
and was further developed on
“Heroes”
. Bowie was also particularly impressed with Iggy’s way with words: “‘[China Girl]’ has an extraordinary lyric, and it was really sort of thrown out as he was writing it,” Bowie recalled in 1993. “It was literally just thrown out on the recording session, almost verbatim. He changed maybe three or four lines. But it was an extraordinary talent that he had for spontaneous free thought.”

Iggy Pop’s lyrics pointed Bowie towards a new way to write, which shows up on
Low
(“the walls close in and I need some noise” [“Dum Dum Boys”] sounds a bit like a lost line from “Sound and Vision”). On previous albums, you got the feeling that Bowie’s efforts to escape cliché had him resorting to ever more baroque constructions and
recherché
imagery. And sometimes, he went too far (“where the dogs decay defecating ecstasy, you’re just an ally for the leecher, locator of the virgin king”). But with Iggy Pop, there’s no sixth-form cleverness. He pulls off the trick of avoiding cliché while keeping it simple, direct and personal. Death stalks the seventies work of both Bowie and Iggy Pop, but Bowie has nothing quite so blunt as “though I try to die, you put me back on the line.” Instead, he locates the death impulse in the mystique of rock ’n’ roll suicides, of lovers jumping in the river holding hands, and so on. Such romantic imagery is eschewed on
Low
.

The Idiot
is a blistering album that brought out the best in both of them. It was no great commercial success at the time, but then again no commercial concessions had been made in its creation either. Nonetheless, in its way,
The Idiot
turned out to be just as influential as
Low
. It’s hard to imagine the curdled croon of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis if Iggy Pop hadn’t got there first. And “Mass Production” is almost a template for Joy Division (and quite probably the last song Ian Curtis ever heard as well—
The Idiot
was still spinning on the turntable when his wife discovered his lifeless body). If
Iggy Pop was the godfather of punk, then
The Idiot
was the sound of Iggy keeping a step ahead (with Bowie’s help of course), shepherding a new generation towards the post-punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties.

Bowie was still suffering from mental problems—from paranoia and black magic delusions. On several occasions he’d turned up at the hospital at nearby Pontoise, convinced he was being poisoned. Another time, Iggy Pop playfully pushed him into the Château swimming pool. Visibly shaken, Bowie decided to abandon the recording sessions on the spot—months before at a party in Los Angeles, the actor Peter Sellers had warned him of the occult danger of “dark stains” at the bottom of swimming pools. The sessions were held up for several days, until Iggy persuaded him to return. Sound engineer Laurent Thibault also got on the wrong end of Bowie’s paranoia. Thibault basically coproduced the album and comixed it as well, with Tony Visconti, but Bowie left him (and all session musicians) off the credits. Bowie had got it into his head that Thibault had smuggled a journalist into the Château, although in fact he’d known all about it and probably arranged it. “David wasn’t there for the interview, but he told me a journalist was coming and told me what I had to say to him,” recalled Thibault. “Then after, when David returned to the Château, he threw the copy of
Rock ’n’ Folk
[a sort of French
Rolling Stone
] at my face as he got out of the car. He said he didn’t know there was a traitor among us.… The journalist had asked the names of the
musicians. David had been happy to share the information, but had changed his mind since, he didn’t want anyone to know. He then told me that this French article might appear internationally, that what I’d said would be taken at face value, and that, consequently, he couldn’t put my name on the record sleeve. Of course, my jaw dropped to the ground, and on the way back to Paris, he said that it’d teach me a lesson.”

In August, with the Château already booked for another band, the
Idiot
sessions moved on to the Munich Musicland studios, owned by Giorgio Moroder. Bowie met up with Moroder and his producer partner Peter Bellote, the architects of the synthetic eurodisco sound that was sweeping Germany at the time. There were never any plans to work together at that time (they would do years later), but viewed from a certain angle, Moroder and Bowie weren’t so very far apart in what they were doing. Moroder was using the New York disco sound and marrying it with synthesisers and a thumping robotic beat to create a particularly European-flavoured dance music. And the following year, Moroder and Bellote would produce Donna Summer’s hugely influential synth disco anthem “I Feel Love,” which impressed Eno greatly at the time.

According to Bowie, he and Eno started meeting up at around this point. Bowie: “At our regular sound swap-meets in 1976, Eno and I exchanged sounds that we loved. Eno offered, among others, his then current fave, Giorgio
Moroder and Donna Summer’s military R&B and I played him Neu! and the rest of the Düsseldorf sound. They sort of became part of our soundtrack for the year.” This sounds a little unlikely—Eno would have already heard Neu! by the summer of 1976, since he’d already met and worked with Neu! guitarist Michael Rother (Rother’s other group, Harmonia, had been championed by Eno as early as 1974).

In any case, Neu! was certainly a part of Bowie’s musical landscape at the time: “I bought my first vinyl
Neu! 2
in Berlin around 1975 while I was on a brief visit,” he later recalled. “I bought it because I knew that they were a spinoff of Kraftwerk and had to be worth hearing. Indeed, they were to prove to be Kraftwerk’s wayward, anarchistic brothers. I was completely seduced by the setting of the aggressive guitar-drone against the almost-but-not-quite robotic/machine drumming of Dinger. Although fairly tenuous, you can hear a little of their influence on the track
Station to Station
. Indeed, in the summer of ’76 I called Michael Rother and asked whether he would be interested in working with myself and Brian Eno on my new album entitled
Low
. Although enthusiastic, Michael had to decline and to this day I wonder how that trilogy would have been affected by his input.”

Again, Bowie is muddling a few things up here. He wasn’t in Europe at any time in 1975, so presumably it was more like the spring of 1976 that he first got hold of a Neu! album. (That perplexes me, since I too detect a Neu! influence
on
Station to Station
.) And Michael Rother recalls being contacted by Bowie in 1977 for the
“Heroes”
sessions, not for
Low
. According to a 2001 interview with Bowie in
Uncut
magazine, it was one “Michael Dinger” who had been Bowie’s first choice for guitarist on
Low
. Bowie no doubt means Klaus Dinger, the other half of the Neu! duo. Bowie had supposedly called him up from the Château, but Dinger had politely refused.

Rother and Dinger had originally played in Kraftwerk, but left in 1971 to pursue their more organic sound, recording three influential albums (
Neu
,
Neu! 2
and
Neu! 75
). The Neu! sound was about textures, and about stripping things back to simple structures until you arrived at a spacey, meditative groove, often referred to as
motorik
. (Eno: “There were three great beats in the 70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s Funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.”)
Motorik
was basically a steady 4/4 rhythm that would often fade in slowly, but what made it different was that there were no tempo changes, no syncopation and minimal variations. The guitars and other instrumentation accompanied the beat, rather than the other way around. It was very human, a pulse that simply went on and on, inducing a trancelike state of mind and the gentle welling of emotion. “It’s a feeling, like a picture, like driving down a long road or lane,” Klaus Dinger explained in 1998. “It is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion.”

Bowie mentions Neu! quite a bit at this time, but I don’t
hear anything on
Low
that sounds too much like them (although “A New Career in a New Town” is something of a tribute to Neu! offshoot La Düsseldorf). Nonetheless, there is a convergence in the approach of bands like Neu! and what Bowie was to do on
Low
. The feeling that a lot of German artists had then of being forced to start again with a blank page after the betrayals of a previous generation, of having to pare it all down to nothing in order to see what will emerge, all that resonates on
Low
. The rock star moves and masks partially give way to a junky trying to kick the habit while living above an auto repair shop in an immigrant quarter of Berlin. “Nothing to say, nothing to do …I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision.”

Another element that the Bowie of
Low
shares with German bands like Neu! and Can is the willingness to treat music as soundscapes, rather than structured songs with their melodic “narratives.” That very much informs tracks like “Weeping Wall” or “Subterraneans.” These have an emotional quietude about them as well, quite different from the histrionic register that Bowie more often retreated to on earlier albums to express emotion. Many of the German bands also shared a strategy of radical repetition overlaid with experimentation. There was Neu!’s
motorik
rhythm, Kraftwerk’s robotic beats, but also Can’s endless grooves on songs like “Halleluwa,” that sound like a long jam but were in fact carefully reconstructed in the studio with tape loops. Bowie and Eno were converging on similar studio-driven
ideas of repetition-plus-experimentation.