The Man Who Sold the World (35 page)

BERLIN

B
owie's first visit to West Berlin was in October 1969, in the company of Kenneth Pitt. He saw the infamous wall that enclosed the “free” sectors of the city and caught a voyeur's glimpse of the nightlife portrayed in the musical
Cabaret
. The night after he returned to London, he and Angie watched a BBC-TV documentary about Christopher Isherwood, the author of the thirties stories on which
Cabaret
was based. Angie would later declare Isherwood her favorite writer; Bowie was equally entranced, his enjoyment of
Goodbye to Berlin
enhanced by the uneasy decadence he had witnessed with his own eyes. He returned briefly in 1973, and again in 1976, before deciding after his concert at the city's Deutschlandhalle that this should become his refuge from the chilling liberation of Los Angeles. “I have to put myself in those situations to produce any reasonably good writing,” he insisted later, “forcing myself to live according to the restrictions of that city.”

The city that one commentator dubbed “the twentieth century's dystopia: a city of expressionistic anguish” had, by the mid-seventies, become “unsettlingly foreign, a place where alien cultures and customs were evident at every turn.” Bowie spent much of his leisure time in Kreuzberg, a milieu of aliens (economic migrants from Turkey, laborers from Africa and Asia who had been expelled when the East no longer required their services), and artists; punks and radicals; drugs and prostitution. It was an ideal venue for a man who wanted to feel a hint of danger and did not wish to travel far for his kicks. Addicts and teenage whores gravitated toward the Zoo Station, inspiring an early eighties movie (
Christiane F
), for which Bowie provided the soundtrack. The modern expressionist painters exhibited at their newly opened gallery and filled the cafés and gay bars with radical chatter: Bowie soon crossed paths with their most prominent figure, Salome, an artist and punk musician. Among the paintings he was displaying during Bowie's residence in Berlin was his Fuck series of canvases, which might have been designed to appeal to the singer: they featured naked, masked balloon creatures in homosexual poses, against vivid, bloodred sheets.

Red was the color of another group of extremists adrift in West Germany: the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF/Red Army Faction, commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group). This was an anticapitalist terrorist cell, determined to exile American influence from West Germany, bring down former Nazis who still occupied positions of privilege, and pledge solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world, especially the Palestine liberation movement. Its roots lay in the late sixties protests of students and other activists, met with violence by police in West Berlin. Founder member Gudrun Ensslin declared: “This fascist state means to kill us all. . . . This is the Auschwitz generation, and there's no arguing with them.” Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and others were arrested, and either escaped from prison or went on the run before they could be sentenced. Their crusade was joined by groups of mental health patients who, like the radical psychiatrists of Britain, believed that the repressive state was the cause of their inability to exist within the system; unlike their UK counterparts, they took up arms alongside the Red Army Faction.

Bowie's time in Berlin saw the battle between terrorists and the state reach a bloody climax known as the Deutscher Herbst (German autumn), which involved the kidnapping and killing of a prominent German industrialist; the hijacking in Majorca of a Lufthansa jet, the pilot of which was killed (alongside three of the hijackers); and the suicide
*
in their cells of all the leading RAF figures. At the same time, violence framed the city from another direction, as the East German government built its third and most impregnable wall around West Berlin, sparking another bout of suicides among the effectively imprisoned residents. Doctors diagnosed a widespread epidemic of
Mauerkrankheit
(or wall sickness). Every few months, meanwhile, an inhabitant of the east would attempt to scale the wall and fall victim to the mines that littered the border area.

Little wonder, then, that Bowie recalled later that West Berlin was “an ambiguous place,” where it was hard “to distinguish between the ghosts and the living.” It was, he said, the city that foretold the future of Europe, and, more oppressively, “a macrocosm of my own state of mind”: an isolated outpost amid a sea of oppression, perhaps. Yet it was here that he was able to complete two records, plan a third, and regain the sense of identity that he had virtually destroyed in Los Angeles. The Bowie who left Berlin for New York in 1979 was physically, mentally, and morally almost unrecognizable as the haunted, addicted figure who had arrived there three years earlier.

 

[143] SUBTERRANEANS

(Bowie)

Recorded December 1975 and September 1976;
Low
LP

Soon after the
Low
sessions had finished, Brian Eno revealed the methodology behind “Warszawa” [140] and “Subterraneans”: “Instead of having a lot of singing and an instrumental, there's a lot of instrumental and a tiny bit of singing . . . it's not words: it's phonetics. It's not lyrics, you see. He's just using very nice-sounding words that aren't actually
*
in any language.” Eno also hinted that “Subterraneans” had been retrieved from Bowie's abortive attempt to supply soundtrack music for
The Man Who Fell to Earth
. Bowie had previously promised that the film soundtrack would feature electronic music “without vocals that you'd recognise.” The track's title was a nod to Jack Kerouac, Bowie's favorite author as a teenager, whose novel
The Subterraneans
recounted an affair with an African-American woman (a subject with which Bowie enjoyed some familiarity). More substantial was the clue provided by the music itself, and in particular Bowie's superb multidubbed vocals: he must surely have been familiarizing himself with the polyphonic writing of plainsong composers, as his lines were harmonized as if they derived from some long-suppressed setting of the Catholic Mass.

The haunting quality of “Subterraneans” (and, again, “Warszawa”) makes one regret that Bowie and Eno did not dare to create an entire album in this idiom. Even for an iconoclastic rock star, however, this might have been a risk too far. Instead we can cherish the still beauty of this piece, with its delicate textures of vibraphone, synthesized strings, and echoed guitar, interrupted by an ominous bass guitar ascent that constantly threatened to stop short of resolution, but finally provided the F# note that the ear demanded. Subtle flickers of backward guitar rekindled memories of rock's sonic experiments of 1966 by the Beatles and the Byrds—incongruous, in theory, for a piece so imbued with spirituality, but somehow perfect in context. Likewise Bowie's remarkable saxophone solo, his most elegant and directly emotional playing on any record, always opting for “feel” rather than technical perfection.

Yet the album still had two last tricks to play. More than five minutes into the track, a strange croaking sound—like a grumbling bullfrog—could be heard beneath the chorale, debunking the spirituality of the piece. A few seconds later, “Subterraneans” ended—not with comforting resolution, but with a hanging D from Bowie's voices, midway through that tantalizing rise executed throughout by the bass guitar. It was completion and incompletion in the same moment: as unsettling, in its way, as the psychological dramas that this track seemed to have overcome.

LOW
LP

B
rian Eno promised that
Low
would combine elements of “recognisable Bowie” with “the most exciting new concept” he'd come across in years. In retrospect, the format of the album—one side recognizable as “rock,” albeit hardly old-school; the other more ambient—came to appear almost inevitable, especially in the wake of a similar division of styles on “
Heroes
.” But in January 1977, when only the most dogged of Krautrock aficionados had tracked down an import copy of
NEU! '75
, which operated on similar principles,
Low
was regarded as revolutionary. Like
Station to Station
before it, the album established Bowie as a recording artist whom it was impossible to second-guess. There seemed to be no obvious way of tracking his progression from
Hunky Dory
to
Low
in almost exactly five years: even now his willingness to risk losing his audience, and his reputation (many critics reacted badly to
Low
's apparent lethargy), appears courageous.

His psychological turmoil aside, the crucial influences on
Low
were taken to be Brian Eno's resistance to traditional rock structures and sounds, and the mechanized, repetitive approach of much Krautrock. Twenty-five years later, Bowie reflected that the German influence had been overemphasized: “It's still a very organic, blues-driven sound . . . the actual rhythm section is not a metronome, electronic sound like the Germans were doing.” Indeed, what distinguished
Low
and Iggy Pop's
The Idiot
was precisely that amalgam of the darkest and most enticing elements of American and German musical cultures: the robotic, the escapist, the ethereal, the direct, all conveying a state of emotional dissonance, in which depression could be uplifting and boredom became transcendent.

 

[144] SOME ARE

(Bowie/Eno)

 

[145] ABDULMAJID

(Bowie)

 

[146] ALL SAINTS

(Bowie/Eno)

Recorded September–November 1976;
Low
extended CD [144/146];
“Heroes”
extended CD [145]

Bowie's experiments with instrumental textures during the late seventies operated within a different sense of time than his “rock”-oriented material of the same era. His songs on
Low
,
“Heroes
,
”
Lodger
, and
Scary Monsters
may have represented a decisive break from what had gone before but they continued to demonstrate his subconscious desire for movement and progression in his career. Lyrically and musically, each set of recordings had a distinctive collective identity: they were recognizably the work of the same artist, but under the influence of different concepts and motives.

His instrumental work, with and without Brian Eno, was much more integrated—or, if you like, unadventurous. Bowie's giant leap was envisaging himself as an artist who could make music without words: once he had escaped the conventional borders of rock and pop, he was able to relax and play, without the almost addictive desire to create new sounds and styles. So his more ambient work was much more difficult to locate within a definite time frame: there was no stylistic or technological gulf between his earliest experiments on
Low
and “Crystal Japan” [179], recorded three years later during the
Scary Monsters
sessions.

“Some Are” and “All Saints” were first released on the CD reissue of
Low
; “Abdulmajid” (named, obviously after the event, for Bowie's second wife, Iman) appeared on the
“Heroes”
CD. Officially remixed in 1991, they may also have been augmented or completed at that time, while some sources insist that “Some Are” actually predated the Eno collaboration, and was written during the soundtrack sessions for T
he Man Who Fell to Earth
in 1975.

“Some Are” differed from most of its contemporaries in having a set of lyrics (four lines of random images, emoted in a soft, intimate voice) and also a smooth texture that brought Bowie close to the troubled territory of New Age
*
music. Even at its least disturbing, however, Bowie's music introduced a little grit to the smooth surface of voice and synthesizers, in the form of an expanding hubbub of noise. “Abdulmajid” followed a similar rise-and-fall melody to “Crystal Japan,” though in its 1991 presentation its gentle synthesizer tones were masked by a “trance” rhythm that was obviously added long after the original recording date. “All Saints” (its title borrowed from Kandinsky's turbulent canvases of 1911) represented a collage of sounds rather than a simple melody, with guitar power chords and sustain suggesting the birth of a new genre, ambient R&B. Pleasant though all three compositions were, however, they added nothing substantial to Bowie's European canon.

ROCK ON THE
TITANIC
: Punk

N
either
Station to Station
nor
Low
topped the British album charts. But the records that did achieve that status in 1976 and 1977 included greatest hits compilations by Perry Como, Roy Orbison, Slim Whitman, Abba, the Beach Boys, the Stylistics, Bert Weedon, Glen Campbell, the Shadows, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Connie Francis, Elvis Presley (in the aftermath of his death), the Supremes, Cliff Richard, and Bread. The US charts, from which these retrospective compilations were barred, were dominated by the soft rock of Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac. Neither were the singles charts any more exhilarating: 1976 was the era of disco, easy listening, and sing-along pop ditties that made the bubblegum hits of 1970 sound positively raw by comparison. You did not have to be desperate for anarchy to find the likes of the Captain and Tennille, Barry Manilow, or the Bellamy Brothers bland.

Rock was now something to be experienced in the arenas that David Bowie filled during his 1976 tour. As the Who's Pete Townshend recalled a decade later, “That rather camp and glossy show-business side of rock was something that the audience wanted. . . . The halls were getting bigger. So the staging had to be grander . . . and that did lead to theatrical pomposity.” By common consent, ticket prices were too expensive; rock stars were utterly distanced from their audiences, both in concert and in their everyday lives; the music of emotional and social liberation had become a form of alienation.

In two wonderful think pieces in the
New Musical Express
, “Is Rock'n'Roll Ready for 1976?” (January 3, 1976) and “The Titanic Sails at Dawn” (June 19, 1976), writer Mick Farren teased out the implications of this perilous divide between audience and artists. “Is rock'n'roll on an unalterable course to a neo–Las Vegas?” he asked in his first article. “It sure looks like it.” Five months later, nothing had changed: “Has rock'n'roll become another mindless consumer product that plays footsie with jet set and royalty while the kids who make up its roots and energy queue up in the rain to watch it from 200 yards away? . . . It is time for the 70s generation to start producing their own ideas, and ease out the old farts who are still pushing tired ideas left over from the 60s.”

Farren exempted Bowie (“the only figure who seems to have the least interest in the social progress of rock'n'roll”) from criticism. Perhaps he had read Bowie's intuitive take on the inertia of modern pop culture, delivered to American journalist Lisa Robinson in February 1976: “To cause an art movement, you have to set something up and then destroy it . . . the only thing to do is what the Dadaists, the surrealists did: complete amateurs who are pretentious as hell and just fuck it up the ass. Cause as much bad, ill feeling as possible, and then you've got a chance of having a movement. But you'll only create a movement when you have a rebellious cause, and you can't have a rebellious cause when you're the most well-loved person in the country.”

Taken alongside Farren's rhetoric, this was practically a blueprint for the punk rock movement. Yet Bowie's instinct carried him further than that. In the wake of his early 1976 world tour, he effectively vanished for the remainder of the year—recording
The Idiot
and
Low
, in fact, but removed from the criticism that was hurled at other rock “dinosaurs,” such as the Rolling Stones and the Who. He reappeared onstage in early 1977, providing keyboards for Iggy Pop. As Iggy was acknowledged as one of the premier influences on punk, Bowie won street-level credibility by association. The sonic gulf between the two albums he released that year and the work of his peers simply reinforced his elite status among rock's elder statesmen.

“Punk was absolutely necessary,” Bowie declared in 1979, though as early as 1977 he had warned about the artistic dangers of group identity and uniformity: “a set of people has the most devastating effect on one's chances of producing anything.” By then, anyone who had sampled the relentlessly conformist sound of most British punk, trapped between its stylistic barriers like a bobsleigh on the track, knew exactly what he meant. In his absence, he had sidestepped any accusations of irrelevance, and also the kind of creative misjudgment that, for example, caused Paul McCartney (only five years older than Bowie) to write a punk song, titled “Boil Crisis.”

Better still, few connections were drawn between Bowie's muddleheaded espousal of fascism as a form of social cleansing and the Nazi paraphernalia displayed by many of the original wave of London punks. As journalist Norman Shrapnel noted in his end-of-the-decade survey, “Germanic influences were plain, and anybody wanting to scare themselves with the more shuddering sort of 30s parallel had only to look at the decadent echoes . . . and at the black leather battalions, the storm-trooper uniforms, even the swastikas that broke out like a contagion.” Neither a dinosaur nor the inspiration for punk's most lamentable lapse in fashion, Bowie had continued to display his uncanny knack for remaining an outsider without losing touch with his audience. They, in turn, began to reflect his influence when they formed their own post-punk bands in the late seventies and early eighties, combining the scorched-earth philosophy of punk with the sonic experimentation of his 1976–80 work.

 

[147] BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

Bowie's first twelve months back in Europe was a period of stunning creativity, which produced four albums (two solo, two by Iggy Pop). The last of them—reuniting the team of Bowie, Eno, and Visconti—opened with an electronic growl, as if a computer had been awoken from a deep slumber. Then a piano hit the first two beats of every eight-beat bar (the rhythm tapped out on the edge of a cymbal); African percussion rattled menacingly; a guitar howled into life; the piano erupted to devour each beat; and the creator let out his own ominous groan, extended for five bars. If
Low
began in low profile,
“Heroes”
announced itself from the start as an uproarious celebration of man and machine—beauty and the beast, indeed, though the precise identity of each had still to be determined.

Another contrast:
Low
couldn't help but confess, even when it was without words;
“Heroes”
was a deliberate act of distancing Bowie from emotional disclosure, a show of bravado in the face of an unknown threat. Even when he sounded most open, the performance was under strict control—one calm Bowie (low voice) juxtaposed against one hysterical Bowie (high voice), to show off his range. This was a rambunctious display, then, as the singer tossed off lines from an adult nursery rhyme over a lumbering musical vehicle that was not funk, not rock, not disco, but some futuristic combination of them all. This was minimalism par excellence: one chord to cover the verse and chorus; another (alternating between C major and C7) for the more halting middle section.

“I wanted to give a phrase a particular feeling,” Bowie explained in 1978. “Each individual line I wanted to have a different atmosphere, so I would construct it in a Burroughs fashion.” Hence the distance; hence the spontaneous relief from the psychodramas of
Low
; hence the fact that “Beauty and the Beast” was irresistibly obscure, but so cunningly assembled that it didn't matter for a second.

 

[148] JOE THE LION

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1977;
“Heroes”
LP

In 1974, performance artist Chris Burden had himself nailed to the roof of his Volkswagen Beetle in Venice, California. Such was the jolting shock inspired by his concept piece (called
Trans-Fixed
) that many people erroneously recalled having seen him driven around the city streets that day, when in reality his VW traveled no more than a few feet from his garage. His crucifixion maintained a theme that fueled his work in the early seventies: risk and danger as a form of self-expression, entailing voyeuristic guilt from his audience. In that spirit, he was shot in the arm by his assistant in 1971, and in a 1974 piece named
White Light/White Heat
, after one of Bowie's favorite Lou Reed songs, spent twenty-two days lying on the floor of a New York gallery without eating. The fact that he remained out of sight throughout this latter performance, insisting that his audience take his pain on trust, merely added to the ambiguity.

Three years later,
Trans-Fixed
was transferred to Bowie's “Joe the Lion,” who expressed his (or Bowie's) pain in psychological terms. Whatever noise escaped from Burden's mouth as the nails pierced his flesh was surely matched when Joe/Bowie conjured up “your
dreams
tonight” as a threat, not a delicious promise. Yet even self-mutilation wasn't enough to keep an audience amused. “Thanks for hesitating,” Bowie muttered sarcastically, as if standing and watching the artist at work was the greatest sin of all.

“Joe” was also the name that Bowie used for the child that he and his wife had christened Zowie: “Boy,” he shouted twice (emphasizing the word IN BLOCK CAPITALS on the album insert). Was this a subliminal connection?

There were at least two levels of reality at work here, conscious and unconscious; most of us get up and sleep every day, avoiding the nagging of our creativity and our subconscious awareness. Bowie had been reading the work of Colin Wilson, whose insistent message was still: you could connect with the occult, with the potential of one's own psyche and artistry, if you would only WAKE UP.

But when you wake up, it's Monday, and the deadened Cockney of Bowie's voice demonstrated that he could still remember the drudgery of daily life as a work-slave. Yet the alternative was to be an artist and have nails driven through your hands. No wonder that “Joe the Lion” began with an explosion of guitar noise across both channels, followed by a riff that seemed to be scurrying like a robot into dark corners in search of anyone hiding there. From there—and except for the interlude of daily tedium—the track grew more and more intense, prompting one scream from Bowie that was every bit as agonized as John Lennon's wail for his parents on “Mother” in 1970. This was a performance of utter conviction that—on the unconscious level, at the very least—found Bowie investigating the consequences of his chosen profession with a level of honesty so scathing that it took courage to continue.

 

[149] “HEROES”

(Bowie/Eno)

 

[150] “HELDEN”

 

[151] “HEROS”

Recorded June–August 1977; single A-side and
“Heroes”
LP (UK [149]; Germany [150]; France [151])

Courage requires heroes,
*
and not all “heroes” are heroic—which was why Bowie chose to cloak his characters in a protective layer of irony, and quotation marks. Enough has been written elsewhere about the biographical inspiration for this song: Bowie watching out of the Hansa Studios window in West Berlin as two lovers met surreptitiously by the Wall, two lovers who may—or may not—have proved to be (married) record producer Tony Visconti and Antonia Maass. Important though that incident must have been in personal terms, it diminishes the song to have it reduced to a factual account of an affair.

For Bowie clearly had more at stake than a romantic photograph (even if the snapshot of the tryst alongside the ultimate symbol of a divided planet was every bit as romanticized as his lovers in a doorway, or by the river's edge, in the “Sweet Thing” medley [100]). He claimed as the album was released that the song was about the heroism of facing up to reality and staring it down. He was referring to political oppression, but that remark would have had a peculiarly personal resonance to the creator of
Low
. “The
shame
,” he howled at one point, once again channeling the spirit of John Lennon
*
at his most agonized. There was certainly a discrepancy between the initial scenario of the song, which seemed to be nothing more edifying than a pickup by a man trying to convince his soon-to-be-lover that one night of adultery was a heroic act, and the extent of Bowie's emotional investment
*
in its later stages. Early in the song, Bowie was playful and intimate; later he sang as if his soul were on fire. “People like watching people who make mistakes,” he had noted the previous year, “but they prefer watching a man who survives his mistakes.” After the track was released, he preferred to distance himself from the song's emotional content, claiming he was trying to capture the heroism of the Turkish community living in the poorest quarters of West Berlin.

Eno's biographer David Sheppard described how this track was created: “three oscillating VCS3 drones” from Eno, plus “triumphal arcs of guitar [by Robert Fripp] filtered through Eno's extensive treatments . . . to freight the song with its towering opulence.” Structurally, “Heroes” was as simple as anything Bowie had written: it was based on a two-chord (D-G) progression, with a brief excursion to other familiar chords from the key of G. The combination of Eno's synthesizers and Fripp's guitars (three of them, apparently, all retained in the mix) created that strangest of contradictions, a peaceful cacophony of feedback and noise, with guitar notes sustained to infinity. The drums heightened and withdrew the drama, as required, occasionally skipping a backbeat to prove that some humanity was involved. But all the emotional weight of the song rested on Bowie, who successfully journeyed from seduction to existential despair as if it were the most hackneyed route of all.