Bowie's Low
Thoughts on book chronicling David Bowie most interesting creative period from coked out bad vibes in LA to wildly creative weirdness in Berlin
After he was an early 70s rock god with Ziggy Stardust, and before he was rock n roll hall of fame shoe-in, David Bowie went kind of crazy, dabbled in some very dark shit, and made some of his most interesting music. This is the period discussed in Hugo Wilken’s slim volume about Bowie's seminal album “Low”.
The book opens with Bowie at his lowest, most insane level. He is in LA, taking massive amounts of cocaine, engaging in black magic rituals and surrounded by very, very bad vibes. This is the Bowie era chronicled in the documentary, Cracked Actor in which Bowie is gaunt bordering on skeletal and obviously in a bad place. Here’s Bowie himself on this period:
I was so blocked ... so stoned ... It's quite a casualty case, isn't it. I'm amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely.
It wasn’t just the coke though, or the black magic, or the extremely expensive litigation with an ex-manager, there was also the facism. We’ve kind of collectively memory holed this part of Bowie’s story, but the mid-seventies was when he debuted the “Thin White Duke” character and flirted pretty openly with fascism,saying at one point that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader" and famously being caught “mid handwave” making what definitely appears to be a nazi salute.
This was Bowie circa 1975-76 – at the end of something dark, barely holding on to sanity, and in a bad bad place. How does he work his way out of it? By partnering with two unlikely co-creators, the walking id of American rock n roll, Iggy Pop (no schoolboy himself) and the ultra cultured European Brian Eno. Together these three will make four seminal albums that essentially save Pop’s career and arguably Bowie’s life – Iggy Pop’s “The Idiot”, and Bowie’s so-called “Berlin Trilogy” (only some of which was actually created in Berlin), “Low”, “Heroes”, and “Lodger”.
Heavily influenced by Krautrock and its more electronic offshoots, such as Kraftwerk, these albums were a serious departure from Bowie (and Pop’s!) earlier work. They were very much studio albums, with Eno and co-producer Tony Visconti as co-creators. They were strange, they were haunting, they were not for the arena, and they remain some of my favorite of Bowie’s work.
In his book, Wilken gets into all of this in a bit more detail, how Bowie pulled himself out of the darkness of LA, how they came to create the Berlin sound, and how it may have saved Bowie’s life, but I was left wanting more. This book is part of the 33 ⅓ series so it’s intentionally modest. I’d be happy to read three times as much about this era.
Turn the lights off and imagine you’re in Berlin, 1976. The city is still a shell of what it once was, but it’s beginning to pulse with creativity. You’re a rock star who has completely lost the plot, trying to come out of the deepest of drug addictions, your best friends are a madman from Detroit and perfume obsessed dandy. You’re trying to find your way not back to what you were, but on to something else. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll survive. Someday, this period will be largely forgotten. It will be as if you went from Ziggy straight to a middle-age establishment icon. For now, you’re just trying to live, to figure it out.