David Bowie's Low Read online

  Low

  Praise for the series:

  These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice

  A brilliant series …each one a work of real love—NME

  Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon

  Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

  Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take on a beloved long-player …the books that have resulted are like the albums themselves—filled with moments of shimmering beauty, forgivable flaws, and stubborn eccentricity—Tracks Magazine

  [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut

  The nobility—and fun—of the project has never been questioned …a winning mix of tastes and writing styles—Philadelphia Weekly

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  For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com

  Also available in this series:

  Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

  Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

  Harvest by Sam Inglis

  The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

  Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

  Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

  Electric Ladyland by John Perry

  Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

  The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

  Let It Be by Steve Matteo

  Live at the Apollo by DouglasWolk

  Aqualung by Allan Moore

  OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

  Let It Be by Colin Meloy

  Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

  Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

  Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

  Grace by Daphne Brooks

  Murmur by J. Niimi

  Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

  Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

  Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes

  Endtroducing. . . by Eliot Wilder

  Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

  In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper

  Music from Big Pink by John Niven

  The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

  Loveless by Mike McGonigal

  Doolittle by Ben Sisario

  Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

  There’s a Riot Goin’On by Miles Marshall Lewis

  Stone Roses by Alex Green

  Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

  Forthcoming in this series:

  London Calling by David L. Ulin

  Low

  Hugo Wilcken

  2011

  Continuum International Publishing Group

  80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  © 2005 by Hugo Wilcken

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-3129-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilcken, Hugo.

  Low / Hugo Wilcken.

  p.cm. -- (33 1/3)

  Includes bibliographical references (p.).

  1. Bowie, David. 2. Bowie, David. Low. I. Title. II. Series.

  ML420.B754W55 2005

  782.42166′092--dc22

  2005018992

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  acknowledgements

  introduction

  from kether to melkuth

  the visitor

  one magical movement

  talking through the gloom

  what can i do about my dreams?

  waiting for the gift

  through morning’s thoughts

  i’ll never touch you

  je est un autre

  a little girl with grey eyes

  nothing to do, nothing to say

  round and round

  sometimes you get nowhere

  moving on

  honky château

  city of ghosts

  do you remember that dream?

  all that fall

  pulsations

  afterlife

  homesick blues

  crash your plane, walk away

  bibliography

  acknowledgements

  Thanks to my family, particularly Patrick Wilcken, for his help with research and critical reading of the text. Thanks also to David Barker, for commissioning the book; to Nick Currie, for an interesting exchange of e-mails; to Chris from menofmusic.com, for locating and sending me material; and to everyone else who helped in the writing of the work. And a special thank you to Julie Street, for her significant editorial input and all-round support.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend

  Peter Meyer (1964–2003).

  introduction

  I first heard Low in late 1979, soon after my fifteenth birthday. One of my older brothers had sent me a cassette, home-taped from the vinyl. I was far from my family and my native Australia doing a term of school in Dunkirk in northern France, ostensibly to learn French. Dunkirk was a grey simulacrum of a city. It had been destroyed during the Second World War, and entirely rebuilt afterwards according to the original plans. Every building contained the ghost of its bombed-out twin. At the city’s edge, a wide desolate beach stretched out for miles. At low tide, you could see the wrecks of boats that had never made it across the Channel, during the desperate evacuation of Allied troops in 1940. Flanders is only twelve kilometres to the east, and the landscape around Dunkirk is similar—fluorescent green fields that are unrelentingly flat, quite disorientating for someone from hilly Sydney. In winter, the northern, pewter skies hung oppressively low, and the drizzle was constant. My French was approximate and communication difficult, accentuating the sense of isolation that is the natural state for a fifteen-year-old boy. Of course, Low was the perfect soundtrack.

  Fifteen is the age of bedroom retreat, and three of the five Low songs with lyrics use withdrawal to a bedroom as a symbol for isolation. It’s also the age of ravenous intellectual curiosity, of devouring books and art and music to access new worlds of the imagination. Low seemed to be a glimpse into such a world, one that I didn’t really understand, subverting my expectations of what I’d understood a pop record should be. “Always Crashing in the Same Car” had the spooked feeling of a recurring dream; “A New Career in a New Town” had a yearning about it that looked both forward and back. The instrumentals on the second side weren’t pop music at all, and had allusive titles such as the punning “Art Decade,” “Weeping Wall” or “Subterraneans,” which suggested fading civilisations gone to ground. The album left a haunting impression.

  In the eighties, David Bowie forfeited a fair chunk of his artistic mystique in exchange for megastardom as a stadium entertainer, and my interest moved on to other things. Lately, he’s redeemed himself somewhat, but it’s only in the past few years that my attention turned back to what now seems to me to be a fascinating moment in the mid-
seventies, when people like Bowie, Brian Eno or Kraftwerk were redefining what it meant to engage with the pop and rock genres. It was partly about injecting an experimental, European sensibility into a medium that was largely American in its conception. Of course, high and low art had been collapsing into each other ever since Warhol, Lichtenstein and the other pop art innovators had emerged in the early sixties. But if in the sixties it was art that was slumming it with pop aesthetics, the reverse was happening in the mid-seventies. Pop went arty. And Low marks the highpoint of this development, with its atmosphere of modernist alienation, its expressionism, its eclectic blend of R&B rhythms, electronics, minimalism and process-driven techniques, its suspicion of narrative.

  I don’t want to put Low into any sort of canon of great works. That seems to me to be imposing notions of worth from another age and a different cultural enterprise. Not a lot of modern culture can be treated in that way any more, and pop culture certainly can’t. No single album can bear the weight of greatness, torn away from the support of all the other songs and all the other albums, the whole fabric of the hybrid culture that produced it. That’s pop culture’s strength, not its weakness. And that’s why in this book I’m going to talk around Low almost as much as I talk about it—looking at how it relates to the other points on the cultural matrix, where it came from, how it fits with Bowie’s artistic development. In short, what ingredients went into making an LP that Bowie once said captured “a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.”

  from kether to melkuth

  As far as the music goes, Low and its siblings were a direct follow-on from the title track of Station to Station. It’s often struck me that there will usually be one track on any given album of mine which will be a fair indicator of the intent of the following album.

  —David Bowie, 2001

  I see Low as very much a continuation from Station to Station, which I think is one of the great records of all time.

  —Brian Eno, 1999

  The journey towards Low begins with the rattling pistons of a locomotive, opening the title track of David Bowie’s previous album Station to Station, recorded in Los Angeles in late 1975. Retro steam train noises fade in then move across the aural landscape, literally, from the left channel to the right. (The album was actually recorded in quadraphonic sound—one of those forgotten hi-fi innovations of the seventies—with the train circling its way around all four speakers.) Bowie had pinched the train noises from a radio sound effects record, and had then further treated them in the studio, using equalisation and unconventional phasing methods, giving them that skewed, not-quite-real feeling that is emblematic of this strange album.

  Those train sounds herald the theme of restless travel as a spiritual metaphor, also present on Low and the following albums of what Bowie calls his “Berlin triptych” (Low, “Heroes”, Lodger). Sonically, Station to Station is a voyage in itself, journeying from the mid-seventies funk of the New York disco scene to the pulsing motorik beat of experimental German bands such as Neu!, Can or Kraftwerk. In fact, those opening sound effects are pretty much an hommage to Kraftwerk’s unlikely 1974 hit Autobahn, which begins with a car revving up and driving off, the sound also crossing over from left to right channel.

  Like Autobahn, Station to Station is a veritable epic in rock/pop terms. Clocking in at over ten minutes, this is the longest track Bowie has ever written (the instrumental introduction alone outdistances most songs on Low). It’s over a minute before Earl Slick’s guitar kicks in, mimicking at first a train whistle, then the clunking sounds of engines and wheels on track. “I got some quite extraordinary things out of Earl Slick,” Bowie has said. “I think it captured his imagination to make noises on guitar, and textures, rather than playing the right notes.” That experimental groping towards sound as texture rather than chords and melody is definitely there all right, even if it’s not really followed through on the rest of the album.

  From there on, there’s a gradual building up of instrumentation. A metronomic two-note piano figure sets up a self-consciously mechanical beat, which is almost immediately opposed by the R&B rhythm section of Dennis Davis (drums), George Murray (bass) and Carlos Alomar (guitar). Alomar’s funk licks battle it out with Slick’s noise guitar, while the mellotron overlays a melody line against a chaos of bizarre industrial sound effects.

  Already, before Bowie has sung a note, a musical agenda is being laid down. Alomar sees it as “funky on the bass, but everything on top was just rock ’n’ roll.” That captures part of what it was: funk instrumentation with European-style lead melody. For Bowie, “Station to Station was really the rock-format version of what was to come on Low and “Heroes”. I was at the time well into German electronic music—Can, and all that. And Kraftwerk had made a big impression on me.” What Bowie was working his way towards was some kind of hybridisation between the R&B he’d already pastiched on Young Americans and the textures and beats of the German Kosmische bands (of whom more later), along with other experimentalists in both the rock and classical worlds. That hybridisation is mostly left suggested on Station to Station. But new territory is clearly being marked out, quite different from earlier successes like Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust, which, from a musical perspective, remain conventional slices of English rock.

  After the extended funk/industrial workout, Bowie’s vocals crash in, and things start to get weird. The first half-dozen lines pack in a bewildering array of allusions to gnosticism, black magic and the kabbala (a medieval school of Jewish mysticism). “The return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes / The return of the thin white duke, making sure white stains.” This is for initiates only—the sexual/drug connotations of the “white stains” may be obvious enough, but the casual listener will hardly pick up that it’s also the title of an obscure book of poetry by the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). “Throwing darts in lovers’ eyes” also references Crowley, alluding to a no doubt apocryphal incident in 1918, when Crowley killed a young couple in a magical rite that involved hurling darts.

  A mangled version of a famous line from Shakespeare’s Tempest (“such is the stuff from where dreams are woven”) recalls another magician, Prospero, who is of course a duke, banished to an island (“tall in my room overlooking the ocean,” as Bowie puts it). And the “magical movement from kether to melkuth” suggests more than a passing interest in The Tree of Life, a kabbalistic treatise written by Crowley disciple Israel Regardie. The Tree of Life is a mystical diagram in which kether represents the godhead and melkuth the physical world, while the magical movement between the two enacts the Gnostic myth of the Fall. In the booklet of the current remaster of the album, an anaemic Bowie is to be seen sketching out the Tree of Life on a studio floor.

  It doesn’t end there: there are plenty of other occult allusions to be teased out—“lost in my circle,” “flashing no colour,” “sunbirds to soar with” all have their specific mystical meanings. According to Bowie, the song is almost a “step-by-step interpretation of the kabbala, although absolutely no one else realised that at the time, of course.” That’s something of an exaggeration—intellectually, the mix of references is rather confused, although it works extremely well on a poetic level.

  Crowleyism was not a rock novelty in 1975. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was a disciple; Can’s extraordinary Tago Mago (1971) alludes to Crowley; and arguably the most famous LP ever, Sgt Pepper, depicts Crowley on its cover. Previous Bowie songs also reference occultism (“Quicksand” namechecks Crowley, Himmler and the Golden Dawn society of which both were members), and traces of it subsist on later albums, including Low. But never was it so blatant as on Station to Station. What are we to make of this? Certain critics make a great deal indeed. The late Ian McDonald (whose Revolution in the Head remains the benchmark of Beatles literature) grandly depicts Bowie as a Prospero figure executing an “exorcism of the self, of mind, of the past ….Bowie has ascended the Tree of Life; now he
wants to come down to earth, to love,” and to “cast his occult grimoire into the ocean.”

  There’s another, rather more prosaic reading of these black magic ramblings. “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine,” Bowie opines a little further on in the song, but I think we can safely assume a case of protesting too much. Because the Station to Station sessions represent the high-water mark of Bowie’s prodigious drug intake. By this stage, Bowie had practically stopped eating and was subsisting on a diet of milk, cocaine and four packets of Gitanes a day. He was leading a vampyric existence of blinds-drawn seclusion in his Hollywood mansion, spliced with all-night sessions in the studio. There were times when he’d start recording in the evening then work all the way through until ten in the morning—and when told that the studio had been booked for another band, he’d simply call up for studio time elsewhere on the spot and start work again immediately. Other times, he could vanish altogether: “We show up at the studio,” says Slick. “‘Where is he?’ He shows up maybe five or six hours late. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up at all.” At this stage, Bowie could go five or six days without sleep, the point at which reality and imagination become irretrievably blurred: “By the end of the week my whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.”

  Essentially, Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, a condition very similar to schizophrenia, with its highly distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking. His interviews of the time are classics of messianic delusion, as he raves on about Hitler being the first rock star, or his own political ambitions (“I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism.”). The flipside of messianic fantasy is of course paranoid delusion, which Bowie also displayed in spades. He imagined one of his advisers was a CIA agent; a backing singer was apparently a vampire. During one interview, Bowie suddenly leapt up and pulled down the blind: “I’ve got to do this,” he jabbered. “I just saw a body fall.” He proceeded to light a black candle then blow it out. “It’s only a protection. I’ve been getting a little trouble from the neighbours.” How much of all this was theatre and how much delusion? Bowie was evidently past making such distinctions. His wife of the time, Angie, recounts getting a phone call from him one day in 1975; Bowie was somewhere in Los Angeles with a warlock and two witches who wanted to steal his semen for a black magic ritual. “He was talking in slurred, hushed tones, and hardly making any sense and he was crazed with fear.”