I find that I listen to Low more than any of the other albums, even my favorite: Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.
Inside The Making Of David
Bowie’s Low
Hauntings,
punch ups, martial strife and gin, MOJO relives the chaos of Bowie’s first
European masterpiece.
It started
with two crises, and a work of charity. Throughout David Bowie’s time in Los
Angeles in late 1975, as he descended into a cocaine-addled psychotic
netherworld of alien visitations and Aryan mythology, he had also become
obsessed with the abstract, electronic sound of Kraftwerk. But his first attempt
at assimilating this new movement proved a disaster, when sessions with
arranger Paul Buckmaster at Cherokee studios were abandoned, essentially
unfinished. This was a rare setback, for even in the midst of crisis, David
Bowie had proved remarkably adept, in control of the situation despite the
psychoses that assailed him. After escaping from LA, via rehearsals in Jamaica
and Vancouver for his imminent world tour, Bowie seemed to rebuild himself once
again. Yet it turned out that the one event that truly made David Bowie pull
out of his psychological tailspin was the act of rescuing the man who would be
his companion throughout 1976, namely Iggy Pop.
The troubled ex-Stooge had been through a period of self-abuse and vilification that made Bowie’s LA meltdown look like a walk in the park. Iggy had stabbed himself on-stage, been confined to a mental institution, and by the winter of 1975 was reduced to sleeping on a stolen lounger mattress in a garage in West Hollywood. Finally, he’d been arrested for stealing vegetables and called an old friend, Freddie Sessler, for help.
A concentration camp survivor and man of rugged humour, Sessler was also the supplier of the finest pharmaceutical cocaine on the West Coast. Unsurprisingly, Freddie knew David Bowie very well indeed; for it was the discovery of Merck cocaine – what Sigmund Freud termed “this magical substance” – that had brought David tohis own psychological low. Now, by putting him in contact with Iggy, giving him a damaged soul to heal, Freddie lifted Bowie up again.
He needed
lifting. Bowie’s first electronic music, an intended soundtrack for the movie
The Man Who Fell To Earth, was a mess; without the core of regular musicians
who gave his work shape, the results were aimless meanderings. Then there were
disputes with his newly-acquired manager, Michael Lippman, as well as British
Lion, the company who’d financed the movie. The soundtrack was abandoned, and
the multi-track tapes left in LA. Yet in January 1976, when David hooked up
with Iggy in San Diego, everything snapped into focus. Rather than talk in
depth about personal problems, Bowie simply played him a song, Sister Midnight,
inspired by a funky riff guitarist Carlos Alomar had crafted. Within days,
Bowie proposed he and Iggy record an album – perhaps in Munich, at Conny
Plank’s studio – partly inspired by the Kraftwerk albums Bowie would play in
their long listening sessions in the car. With this project in mind, new songs
seemed to flow out of Bowie, something that had not happened for years. And
“There was a power to the music he was willing to provide for me,” Iggy told MOJO,
“it was perfect – and I loved it.”
The return to Europe – “the European canon” – had engaged Bowie’s thoughts for some time, and there was a delight in his explorations of the spring of 1976,particularly in his impromptu trip to Moscow that April. That March, he told interviewer Stuart Grundy he was planning a move to Berlin (an intention he didn’t confide to his wife Angie). Yet around May 18, his journey took an unexpected route. He, Coco Schwab, his assistant and companion, and Iggy were ensconced at the Hotel Plaza Athénée, in Paris, constantly mobbed by fans, when the enterprising new management of the Château D’Hérouville –the residential studio outside Paris where he’d recorded 1973’s Pin-Ups –reckoned he might need a break, and would, says commercial director Pierre Calamel, “appreciate some French cheese”. The trio turned up for a couple of nights’ break, bringing with them a huge trunk of LPs, which David played to engineer Laurent Thibault. Then Bowie told Laurent he had to take a trip to Switzerland, to look at a house Angie was buying, and would be back soon to record Iggy’s solo LP.
The album
they recorded on their return, The Idiot, was a crucial turning point in Iggy’s
career. It’s also worth emphasising that it was a major turning point in Bowie’s
career too, and stands as a gateway to Bowie’s so-called “Berlin period”.
Station To Station had taken an age to record, but for The Idiot, Bowie had a
string of songs ready, many of which were unformed but brilliant. The studio,
set in the rolling countryside of the Oise Valley, was isolated and nurturing;
Bowie was relaxed, and looked healthy, like “un ange” – an angel – remembers
Kuelan Nguyen, a beautiful Vietnamese woman who was staying at the studio, “ce
qui’ n’était pas!” (“which he wasn’t”). Nguyen remembers Bowie as, “capricious,
authoritarian, tormented, but also intelligent, alive, with a calm humour,
discreet, totally English,” (he had also taken to smoking a pipe).Bowie saw
that Iggy was infatuated with Kuelan and encouraged the couple. Their story
became one of the pair’s finest songs, China Girl. Bowie played most of the
instruments himself, calling in other musicians to augment The Idiot as necessary.
Dark, jagged and deep, the recordings were unlike anything he’d attempted
before; they also constituted the perfect prototype for his own next prototype
for his own next project. As David left the Château to make way for Bad
Company, he booked the studio for a few weeks later, then left to check out
apartments in Berlin.
As with many of Bowie’s key projects, the principal elements of Low – initial working title ‘New Music Night And Day’ – were laid out long before, while a huge amount was left to chance. Here, a main component was to be Brian Eno, whom Bowie knew from Ziggy days, and had met again that summer. The pair had long telephone conversations, and even before the sessions started the concept had arisen of making an album with one side of relatively conventional songs, and one of instrumentals.
Producer Tony Visconti, also part of those early discussions, remembers the thinking involved both what fans would appreciate, and what RCA would accept: “If the A side still had choruses and verses… [and the B-side was instrumental] we felt it was a perfect yin yang balance. Six or seven great songs with David Bowie singing is a good album.”
Complicating
matters was the fact that Eno was working in Germany when the session was
booked to start, on September 8. But all those details were simply left to
chance.
The key
contributors were gathered from random places, like one of those 1970s movies
where a hit squad is assembled from grizzled veterans and sparkly eyed tyros,
then sent off for a mission into the unknown. Carlos Alomar, drummer Dennis
Davis and bassist George Murray were the old hands. Guitarist Ricky Gardiner
probably counted as the novice recruit; he had no idea why he’d been called up,
beyond the fact his friend Tony Visconti had recommended him. Pianist Roy Young
was nearly as uninformed; David had called him to work on Station
To Station, but Young
couldn’t make the session. This time round the veteran British boogie woogie
pianist – who’d played with The Beatles, Cliff Bennett And The Rebel Rousers, and many
others – got called to the phone one night at the Speakeasy club, picked up the
receiver to hear David ask if he’d get a plane over to Paris. David was
persuasive, polite, but like Ricky, Roy had no idea what the project was.
Of course, it seemed obvious that long-term Bowie collaborators such as Carlos Alomar – the man who, among others, gave birth to David’s first US Number 1, Fame – would be given a clear idea of what to expect. But no, says Carlos, the opposite was the case: “I’m not privy to that kind of thing. Whatever planning David has made, I’m not part of it. The situation with me, George and Dennis is that we get a call, telling us to show up. Then we have to start from scratch; we have to pluck it from the air.”
Gardiner and
Young were on the same plane from London. Both discussed the project: “We were
both saying, do you know what it is we’re doing?” says Young, who remembers
Ricky being especially nervous. Ricky, in contrast, remembers Young as being
well-prepared, in that he was toting two bottles of spirits, “one was bourbon
and the other, I think, was whisky.” The pair managed to polish off the bulk of
the former on the flight. By the time they arrived in Paris, “We were not
paying a great deal of attention to proceedings,” says Gardiner; “and we failed
to notice Coco waiting at the barrier to take us to the Château.”
Carlos, George and Dennis had already
laid down rhythms on perhaps a couple of songs when Young and Gardiner arrived
– although no one’s certain of which ones, because so many of the ideas seemed,
in isolation, abstract and hard to grasp. David would give Carlos, usually, a
snippet of lyric – which might or might not make the final version – which
would inform the mood of the piece. Then there might be an eight-bar sequence
of chords. And somehow the musicians had to make sense of it all. Each of them
was chosen because they could contribute something unique; each one had to
reach into their own musical personality, says Carlos: “Then when they
realised, I just have to be myself, they brought their A game to it.” The
Alomar-Murray-Davis trio was given the first go at the songs in order to find
some focus, and cut down on the options. But most of the main songs on the
first side evolved into recognizable shape with Gardiner and Young’s arrival.
As one talks
to the participants, like Visconti, Carlos Alomar, and most of all Iggy Pop –
who, along with David, found personal salvation over this momentous year – a
constant theme emerges: that of sculpting order out of chaos. David was short
of money – his first cheque to the Château bounced, and Coco Schwab would chide
him if he spent too much money on clothes –and he was contemplating how to
extricate himself from his manager, Michael Lippman, his wife Angie and,
lastly, his record company. The music was the one thing to pull him through.
In the
popular conception, Low is often thought of as glacial and cold, inspired by a
sense of withdrawal, a numbness, (or “autism”, as Hugo Wilcken posited in
his work on the album) inspired by Bowie’s continuing cocaine intake. In fact,
the album was inspired by a determined optimism, a reaching toward a new
future. And although David had an occasional toot of cocaine, over this period
he’d largely turned his back on the white powder. If he had a vice, it was
alcohol, usually German beer, although early in recording the
sessions hit a snag when he tried something stronger.
“Tony said, ‘If you ever give David
another gin and tonic, you’re going home.” Roy Young
 |
| Bowie and Tony Visconti |
The unwitting villain of
the piece was Roy Young. He’d been out on the studio floor with the rhythm
section, Alomar and Gardiner as they worked on a song. They all revelled in
working in a luxurious residential studio, with drink on tap. Young kept a
large ice bucket, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of tonic by his piano, “So I
could mix them the way I like them.” He heard a “rat a tat tat” on his headphones,
“and there was David in the control room holding a glass up. So I sent him [a
drink] in there. This happened a few times.”
Despite such
bugs, the recording was focused. They moved on constantly from one idea to the
next. Carlos Alomar remembers having real problems getting his head around one
song, which from the beginning was named Always Crashing In The Same Car. The
title had a black humour of its own, because David was attempting to sell his
Mercedes at the time – the car was dented, and half the time wouldn’t start.
The song, too, spluttered and lurched before it got going: “We didn’t
understand what David wanted,” says Carlos, “and that was definitely the
hardest one to get right. It had this kind of gloomy thing to it, so we kind of
understood that. But it also had this chordal thing I was trying to get… the
chorus is a bit different to the verse, and I felt it was a little disjointed.”
In the end, says Carlos, it was Ricky who unlocked the song; “Not so much
[with] a riff as a signature sound and a signature guitar – which gives an
essence.”
Other songs
did come together easily. Sound And Vision was a key breakthrough; the
musicians thought it was an instrumental. “Carlos provided the riff,” says
Gardiner, “and we put the music together around that.” One of Alomar’s key
contributions to Bowie’s work was his funk-and soul-derived conviction that a
song needed a key theme, right at the beginning, to differentiate it from
whatever hot tune might pop up on the jukebox. Yet for Sound And Vision, his
contribution was as much space as substance; a subtle, slight guitar lick that
left huge gaps for the song to breathe, and let Murray and Davis’s effervescent
rhythm carry the listener along. As the crew sculpted the song out of chaos,
David sat in the control room listening. Then, says Gardiner, “He just went
into the studio and sang it straight off, words and all. He listened to [the
playback] once, adjusted something in his head and did it again. And that was
that.”
Those who spent time with Bowie often
found themselves tickled by the inspiration behind the songs; the final lyrics
sounded enigmatic, but for those in the know, the story was often a literal
depiction of a real event. For two key songs, the inspiration came from the one
moment when the semi-domestic calm in the Château was shattered.
David and
Angie had led almost separate lives for over three years now; in hindsight, it
seems that David had decided to split from his wife at around thesame time he
decided to split from Main Man Management, back in 1974.Angie was still an
integral part of Bowie’s public persona, and he would often pay tribute to her
in public. However, she was regularly kept in the dark about his immediate
plans, a victim of Bowie’s oft-mentioned genius for “compartmentalising”. When
Angie and her companion, Roy Martin, dropped in on the sessions, the Château
went into lockdown. David became suddenly unavailable. The musicians, like
Carlos, had only the most cursory conversations with Angie, although on this
occasion Carlos remembers Angie’s new persona: “It was all, ‘Don’t talk to me,
I’m a big lesbian now,’ and me and[wife and singer] Robin were, What’s all that
about?” Alomar, meanwhile, would try and convince the musicians that all was
normal: “Remember, as a bandleader it’s up to me to be a buffer, so that none
of that stuff influences the album.”
Throughout
such travails, Iggy was David’s prime confidant, joking around and lifting
people out of any depressions (“He was inspirational,” says Alomar.) He would
intervene in crises, such as the time there was a “big row with Angela,” says
Visconti. “She sent her new boyfriend round to cheer up David, hahahaha!” There
was shouting, the sound of glasses being thrown, a “massive fight” and Iggy and
Visconti had to run in and pull David away from Roy. Breaking Glass, an almost
literal description of the incident became a later addition to the album, as
did Be My Wife. On the face of it, this was a love song, asking a lover to
marry him. Yet its real message was a request to the woman to whom he was
already married, to act like a conventional, supportive wife: “Sometimes I get
so lonely – sometimes I get nowhere.” It’s ironic, of course, that
such an arresting, novel album should have a plea for convention at its heart –
but such contradictions were always at the heart of David Bowie’s career.
Roughly a
dozen days into the recording the sessions took a new turn with the arrival of
Brian Eno. Brian had been working in the tiny German village of Forst with
ambient pioneers Harmonia – comprising Neu!’s Michael Rother and Cluster’s
Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius – on the album eventually released as
Tracks And Traces. Eno’s appearance is remembered well by all of the musicians.
Not just because he was intense, or brainy, or amusing, or any of the other
adjectives associated with him, but because he and Bowie shared their doubts
about what they were attempting: “We were halfway through,” says Young, “and
this was when he decided to bring this music in; the music that had been turned
down [from The Man Who Fell To Earth]. We all listened to it – but it was a
little outside of my experience. And it wasn’t only me.” With the bulk of side
one completed, Ricky and Carlos stayed on for overdubs on what would be side
two, while Young and the rhythm section flew home. In those latter moments,
Young did confront David about how the album would be shaped: “What kind of
rock’n’roll is it?” he asked him. “It’s rock’n’roll… yet I’m not sure what it
will be ’til we develop it,” David replied.
There is
much debate about which parts of TMWFTE made it to Low; David himself maintains there were
only some parts of Subterraneans derived from the abortive sessions. Château
engineer Laurent Thibault remembers conventional songs “like Burt Bacharach”
were on the tapes brought in, that a bass drum and one string part surviving
from a 24-track tape, and points out also that part of Where In The World is
another survivor, this time from The Idiot. Whatever the plans, the second half
of Low was
mainly constructed from scratch, rather than recycled. By now, David was
disappearing to Paris for gruelling legal meetings with Michael Lippman’s
representatives. In his absence, Eno quizzed the engineers on how to use the
MCI recording console, then told them: “I have sound, I’m fine,” and laboured
away, painstakingly working out overdubs, on his own. Tony Visconti remembers
that the principal song Eno came up with, the haunting, dystopian Warszawa, was
inspired by three notes Brian heard Tony’s son Morgan picking out on the piano.
(One early mix of the song, say insiders, also featured Bowie on harmonica).
The last
days at the Château were characterised by squabbling and ghost stories. Tony
Visconti didn’t get on with engineer Laurent Thibault – who’d been integral to
the recording of The Idiot, and was becoming too intrusive. Meanwhile, Brian
Eno in particular became convinced that he felt the spectral presence of
Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, star-crossed lovers who had once lived in the
Château. Brian developed a cough – “and Chopin died of consumption!” points out
Gardiner. Thibault, who lived in the studio for years, at first plays down the
stories – “the ghosts were in the echo chambers,” he says – but on further
questioning there are stories of Ouija board sessions, in which ghostly
participants spoke perfect Polish: Chopin’s native language. Finally, with the
bulk of the recording done, Bowie, DeFries, Eno and Iggy decamped to Hansa
Studio 1 in Berlin to complete Weeping Wall and Subterraneans. They were
assisted by Edu Meyer – later a regular collaborator, he was initially called
in to translate. Somehow, David discovered that Edu played cello and asked him
to play on a final track, Art Decade: “I am a score-reading musician,” Eduard
replied, “not an improvising one.” So David remembered his teenage years of
arranging music on manuscript, and scribbled the part out for him.
Bowie’s
record company, RCA, hated the album, which was released in January 1977: “The
attitude totally was, What are we going to do with this?” says then Head Of Press,
Robin Eggar. Tony DeFries, the manager who’d overseen David’s Ziggy breakthrough, was even more dismissive, describing it as a
“piece of crap” that he refused to allow as part of David’s contractual
obligation towards him.
Today, the
sound of Low so permeates our musical landscape that it’s hard to understand the
confusion and distaste it inspired. Recorded at a time when David was
often down, or simply exhausted, today it sounds uplifting, a glorious
evocation of a bright new future. As it was, the confused response of DeFries
and RCA only to served to exacerbate Bowie’s fearlessness and intensify his new
sense of destiny. Before the album was even released, he was already planning
his next gamble.
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- Days ago: MOM = 3850 days ago & DAD = 505 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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