Bowie In Berlin

Thomas Jerome Seabrook

Description

Driven to the brink of madness by cocaine, overwork, marital strife, and a paranoid obsession with the occult, David Bowie fled Los Angeles in 1975 and ended up in Berlin, the divided city on the frontline between communist East and capitalist West. There he sought anonymity, taking an apartment in a run-down district with his sometime collaborator Iggy Pop, another refugee from drugs and debauchery, while they explored the city and its notorious nightlife.

In this intensely creative period, Bowie put together three classic albums—Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger—with collaborators who included Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Tony Visconti. He also found time to produce two albums for Iggy Pop—The Idiot and Lust For Life—and to take a leading role in a movie, the ill-starred Just A Gigolo.

Bowie In Berlin examines that period and those records, exploring Bowie’s fascination with the city, unearthing his sources of inspiration, detailing his working methods, and teasing out the elusive meanings of the songs. Painstakingly researched and vividly written, the book casts new light on the most creative and influential era in Bowie’s career.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781906002589
• Langue: English

Extrait

Bowie In Berlin
A New Career In A New Town
Thomas Jerome Seabrook
A GENUINE JAWBONE BOOK
First edition 2008
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
2A Union Court,
20-22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Editor: John Morrish
ISBN: 978-1-906002-58-9
Volume copyright © 2008 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © 2008 Thomas Jerome Seabrook. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. For more information you must contact the publisher.
The photographs used in this book came from the following sources. Jacket: SIPA Press/Rex Features. MWFTE set: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Rip Torn: Everett Collection/Rex Features. Copenhagen Central: Jan Persson/Redferns. Falkoner Teatret: Jan Persson/Redferns. New York 1976: Roberta Bayley/Redferns. Wembley 1976: Roger Bamber/Rex Features. Low session: Ricky Gardiner. Iggy Rainbow: Ian Dickson/Redferns. Bowie keys: Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Berlin–Tegel: Evening Standard/Getty Images. “Heroes” session: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. Bolan: Sheila Rock/Rex Features. Bing: Everett Collection/Rex Features. Jerry Casale: Ebet Roberts/Redferns. Gigolo still: SIPA Press/Rex Features. Gigolo premiere: SIPA Press/Rex Features. MSG 1978: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART 1: SPEED OF LIFE
1: BLACK NOISE
2: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
3: GOING ROUND AND ROUND
PART 2: NEW MUSIC NIGHT AND DAY
4: DUM DUM DAYS
Iggy Pop: The Idiot
5: WHAT IN THE WORLD
David Bowie: Low
PHOTOGRAPHS
6: NEIGHBOURHOOD THREAT
Iggy Pop: Lust For Life
7: FÜR EINEN TAG
David Bowie: “Heroes”
PART 3: PEACE ON EARTH
8: STAGE & SCREEN
9: DO SOMETHING BORING
10: THE HEART’S FILTHY LESSON
ENDNOTES
DISCOGRAPHY
TOUR DATES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
Consider this: it’s Monday, probably, and if there’s a greasy pipe to be slithered down, David Bowie has slithered down it. He is, by his own admission, lucky to be alive, having come so close to exploding in a coke-fuelled supernova during his recent yearlong stay in Los Angeles. Since then he has relocated to Berlin, in the vain hope of ‘cleaning up’, and now finds himself behind the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes-Benz Ponton, cruising the city’s ripped backside with Iggy Pop, once of The Stooges, in the passenger seat.
This unlikely double-act has been joined at the hip since the start of the year, united by a desire to curb their prodigious chemical appetites and an uncertainty about how on earth to go about it. Some days are better than others. “There’s seven days in a week,” Iggy would later recall: two for bingeing, two for recovery, and three more for “any other activity”. Sometimes that meant painting, reading, or visiting art galleries; sometimes drinking the night away in dimly lit sidestreet clubs, watching women dressed as men dressed as women sing ancient songs of love, loss, and war. On other occasions it meant pulling the top down and putting your foot to the floor, doing laps of the city in search of something better to do.
That, in fact, is what these dum dum boys are up to tonight: riding and riding, in Iggy’s words, or “going round and round” in Bowie’s. Pulling into the Kurfürstendamm, one of the main arteries of West Berlin’s zigzagging network of roads, they spot someone they know, parked by the side of the road – not a friend, mind you, but a drug dealer, whom Bowie is pretty sure has pulled a fast one on them. What can we do about this? he wonders. Stepping out of the car and resolving the situation in gentlemanly fashion isn’t an option. Someone, as he might later sing, could get killed. No, there’s only one thing for this, he thinks, as he rams the front grille of the Mercedes into the back of the dealer’s car – and then reverses, and does it again.
“I rammed him for a good five to ten minutes,” Bowie later recalled, between songs at a BBC concert in 2000. “Nobody stopped. Nobody did anything.” In the end, confident that he’s made his point clearly enough, he drives away, but the incident is far from over. Having broken so dramatically out of the state of catatonic inertia that has dogged him for the past few months, the horror of what he has just done begins to dawn on him. Later the same evening, he finds himself in the basement car park of the hotel in which he and Iggy have been staying, driving round in circles, pushing close to 100 miles per hour and giving serious thought to the idea of bringing a definite close to this sorry charade by ramming the car into a wall. Until, that is, it runs out of gas. Crisis averted, this time.
A couple of weeks later, Bowie is in Hansa Tonstudio 2 with Tony Visconti, putting the finishing touches to the last song to be completed for Low , his newest and most groundbreaking album yet. The song, untitled when Bowie and his band laid down the musical tracks in September, is now called ‘Always Crashing In The Same Car’, and takes as its main lyrical inspiration those hair-raising moments underneath the Hotel Gehrus.
This incident is remarkable enough simply as an indication of the depths to which David Bowie, the greatest musical star of the 1970s, had fallen. But it is even more extraordinary to consider that, at a time of such incredible personal turmoil, he was able not just to continue working, but to create some of the most striking, moving, and groundbreaking work not just of his career but in the history of popular music. His return to Europe after a two-year, self-imposed exile in America precipitated a rush of intensive creativity equalled only by a handful of other musical acts: The Beatles and Bob Dylan in the 1960s, Stevie Wonder in the 1970s, and Prince in the 1980s.
But despite the wealth of innovative and imaginative music Bowie made between 1976 and 1979, his career is generally measured not by this but by the more theatrical, extravagant records he produced earlier in the 1970s, or by the much more commercial, pop-orientated phase he entered into in the 1980s. For so many listeners, even those who have a soft spot for him, Bowie will never be much more than a red-headed, bisexual glam-rocker with eyes of different colours, or the bequiffed, besuited crooner of ’s Dance’ – by his own estimation a much more “humanistic” record than some of his others, but also one that lacked something of the trailblazing vitality of his late 1970s output (which encompasses not just his own Low , “ Heroes” , and Lodger , but also the two albums he co-wrote and produced for Iggy Pop, The Idiot and Lust For Life ).
Even in the midst of this period, Bowie still struggled to shake off the spectre of Ziggy Stardust. During an interview for British television a few months before the release of Lodger , Bowie’s interrogator, Valerie Singleton, confessed to “immediately associat[ing] you with that particular period”. She wasn’t alone then, and isn’t now. But perhaps it’s time to think of him instead in the context of this later and most incredibly fertile phase of his working life, and the circumstances through which he arrived at it.
PART 1: SPEED OF LIFE
1: BLACK NOISE
During the 1970s, David Bowie was British pop’s most talismanic, chameleonic character. Having announced himself in 1969 with his rush-released, zeitgeist-encapsulating ‘Space Oddity’ – a tale of interstellar adventure and communication breakdown that hit Number Five on the UK singles chart just in time for the Apollo 11 moon landing – the singer, songwriter, and trendsetter spent the following decade weaving his way through most of rock and pop’s major strands, breaking ground at a pace few could ever match.
Bowie’s first album release of the 1970s, The Man Who Sold The World , may not have captured too many imaginations at the time, but it did establish several key patterns for what was to follow. Its Led Zeppelin-like hard-rock sound was markedly different to the gentler, acoustic songs on the album that preceded it (which has been known since 1972 as Space Oddity , because of the popularity of the title song, but was originally called David Bowie in Britain and Man Of Words / Man Of Music in the United States). Just as importantly, the album’s cover image – the singer draped across a velvety chaise longue, wearing what he later described as a “man’s dress” – gave an early indication of the theatrical androgyny he would cultivate in the coming years. Alongside an undeniable gift for popular song and a keen sense of the next big thing, what set Bowie apart from the majority of his 1970s peers was his ability to shock and awe in the same breath.
The next couple of years marked David Bowie’s ascent to the top of the pop world in Britain and mainland Europe. Like The Man Who Sold The World , the next album, Hunky Dory , was not an immediate commercial success on its release in the final weeks of 1971; but a song-cycle of such quality was unlikely to be ignored for long. The first bona fide ‘classic album’ in the Bowie canon, its strengths are its masterful marriage of high and lowbrow art, and a pop sensibility doused in cabaret, sexual ambiguity, and lyrics inspired by Nietzsche. Song titles that name-check Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan give a good indication of this set’s musical bent, which is much closer to Space Oddity ’s dreamy pop than the previous year’s proto-metal stylings. The mood is playful right up until the final song, ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, noted by Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray as the singer’s “densest and most impenetrable song,” 1 and often taken to concern David’s schizophrenic stepbrother, Terry.
The opener, ‘Changes’, now held to be among Bowie’s greatest songs, was, surprisingly, not issued as a single in the UK until 1975, but did give the singer his first success on the Billboard chart – albeit a lo