Low

David Bowie Low

David Bowie: Low

Bowie: "[Low] was a relatively straight album. It didn't come from a drug place. And I realized at the time that it was important music. It was one of the better things I'd ever written -- Low, specifically. That was the start, probably for me, of a new way of looking at life." NY rock.com 1997

Towards the end of David Bowie's Station To Station European tour, Bowie picked up Iggy Pop (Bowie had squeezed in time during 1973 to "produce" or at least lend his name to cult-hero Iggy's Raw Power) and the two decided to kick drugs together (Oh yeah?) and make some music in the process. They holed up in Berlin with the tour band's rhythm section:

Carlos Alomar
George Murray &
Dennis Davis

...and dragged in:

a guitarist, Ricky Gardner
a keyboard player, Roy Young &
Brian Eno, the ex-Roxy Music er..."artiste", who had just released the extremely impressive, frequently instrumental, Another Green World plus
occasionally Iggy, Mary (Hopkin) Visconti & others

In many ways Bowie and Eno had a lot more in common than the pop world realised. Both were primarily musicians, usually using words as instruments or colorings, rather than trying to convey a literal meaning and neither labored over them, preferring "spontaneity". The difference was that Eno sounded like he was singing about a shopping list, whereas Bowie's sense of drama and/or melodrama made the listener feel that he actually had "something" to say, whatever that was.

The result of these sessions were two albums, David Bowie's Low & Iggy Pop's The Idiot (see below), though Bowie's is far better known and far more influential.

The lure for getting Eno involved was Bowie's interest in making instrumental music, which eventually occupied all of side 2 of the original vinyl release. You can't imagine the effect that had on sections of the pop world. Try to understand that at the time, Rock'n'Roll was maybe 20 years old. For the first 10 it had mostly been "Moon in June" and for the next 10 it went totally haywire, culminating in Low.

Only a few months before, Bowie had been on Soul Train, the black music pop show, lip-synching his completely abstract, though slightly funky, Golden Years, promoting Station To Station. Now he was making music that had more in common with Gregorian chants than anything rhythmically based.

Low is split into two distinct parts, Side 1 has barely recognisable pop songs, they're more monosyllabic, minimalist, alienated statements mumbled to a whitwashed black beat, while Side 2 is comprised of sombre instrumentals.

As usual, Bowie's lyrics tend to suggest rather than say anything clear but as with the music, they are shorn of their normal melodramatic settings...and being stripped back, suggest more:

Breaking Glass:

"...You're such a wonderful person but you've got problems. Oh, let me touch you..." &

What In The World:

"...I'm just a little bit afraid of you cos Love will make you cry but wait till the crowd goes...What you gonna say to the real me?..."

are tense statements put to the barest minimum of a tune but it's with Sound & Vision that it all comes together. The song sees Bowie calming down, waiting for his muse to return, while the babble of his cocaine abuse drifts into the blackness of what became permanent memory loss.

"...Blue, blue, electic blue, that's the color of my room, where I will live, blue, blue. Pale blinds drawn all day, nothing to say, nothing to do, blue, blue. And I will sit right down, waiting for the gifts of sound and vision..."

Sound And Vision

Then comes a muddy, though journalistic reporting of what caused his excesses, Always Crashing In The Same Car...followed by Be My Wife an austere plea with limp-wristed Ziggy buffoonery a million miles away:

"...Please be mine, share my life, stay with me be my wife. Sometimes you get so lonely..."

Be My Wife

Top and tailed by fairly innocuous instrumentals, Side 1 is a stark, vulnerable Bowie, unlike anything he had done before. However, nothing could prepare you for Side 2, which starts with the towering Warszawa, a cathedral of strange sombre sounds that seems to rise from out of nowhere, as if created by the pain of millions of casually discarded lives.

Without a doubt, Warszawa would probably be David Bowie's most powerful piece of work, ever, if the credits didn't show that Eno wrote and played the music, Bowie just added his perfect, strangled no-language vocals. Simply, simply stunning!

The three remaining instrumentals Art Decade, Weeping Wall & Subterraneans aren't quite as exquisite...though each are powerful in their own right...but they do complement Warszawa beautifully, first retracting, then building slowly, so that by the end of the final track, Subterraneans, a hill has been built from which to see the grandeur of Warszawa even more clearly.

Side 2 of Low remains my favorite David Bowie music, ever.

David Bowie: Low

"... This is my favorite Bowie album, brilliant and original and mysterious..." Amazon reviewer Mr. X

"...Bowie's utterly magnificent 1977 masterpiece Low is an album that is...rich, desolate and beautiful...The first side's sharp, harsh and explosive avant-pop masterpieces share the record with the flip-side's broodingly epic instrumentals..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer gr0ver

"...Rarely is music so provocative and yet so peaceful at the same time..." Amazon reviewer Thomas D. Ryan

"...Low is an experimental album in the true sense of the term Bowie only discovered what he had done after he had done it, a real musical landmark..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer Milt Ingarfield

"...I had this music as a record when I was a teen. Heard a radio program discussing Bowie's career and where he is at 60. I started thinking, 'Hey I haven't heard Low in a long time.' Bought it, cranked it up and got it on the old mp3 player.

Classic..." Amazon reviewer Michael T. Redding

For more info, see:

wikipedia Low

Hugo Wilcken is a Paris-based, Australian-born writer. His book on David Bowie's Low...

Hugo Wilden: David Bowie's Low

"...is filled with interesting facts, beginning with the recording of Station to Station, then the actual recording of Low and the beginning of Bowie's Berlin period..." Amazon reviewer Desmond Barrow Marketplace

In 1992, respected and influential minimalist (for want of a better phrase) composer, Philip Glass released his interpretation of Low, The Low Symphony.

Philip Glass: The Low Symphonies

"...I own many tens of thousands of songs but invariably I listen to the Low Symphony every day just as I have done for years. It is a brilliant strike of creative lightening..." Amazon reviewer Dan

"...Glass takes the themes of the instumental pieces form Bowie's Low album and develops themes in three full symphonic pieces, not in the usual way, by simply arranging them for orchestra but also by adding more themes and musical ideas, basically rewriting them..." Amazon reviewer Bobez