Low (1977)

The Bowie Project #11 – Low (1977)

David Bowie’s 11^th studio album, Low, was released on January 14^th, 1977, by RCA Records. After years of worsening cocaine addition Bowie needed to get out of Los Angeles and get clean. Along with proto-punk icon Iggy Pop he relocated to Europe, and it is in this fragile emotional state that Bowie starts work on the experimental art rock trio of album’s that would eventually become known as the “Berlin” trilogy. The first of these albums was Low, an avant-garde pop-rock record that was highly influenced by German bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, Tangerine Dream and CAN as well as the ambient work of former Roxy Music pianist Brian Eno, who collaborated with Bowie on this album as well as the rest of the trilogy. The first half the album features short, direct, avant-pop song fragments with lyrics that reflect Bowie’s brittle state of mind, and side-two is mostly instrumental tracks inspired by a European sensibility. For the first time Bowie was treating music as a tool to create atmospheric soundscapes rather than a platform to showcase melodic narratives. As a largely instrumental album it’s said many of the tracks were originally supposed to have lyrics, but the words just wouldn’t come to Bowie, it’s essentially a rehabilitation album and it sounds just like the kind of thing someone attempting to break free of a deep state of spiritual ennui might produce.

The origins of this record can be traced to two other artistic projects. The first is the cancelled soundtrack album for The Man Who Fell to Earth, a sci-fi movie which Bowie also starred in. This uncompleted album is rumoured to be locked away in vault somewhere and has never been released but is supposed to be the first inkling of the new sound that would be found on this record. Bowie produced five or possible six tracks for the album and presented them to the film’s director Nicolas Roeg who found them completely unusable. But still the album’s spacey ambient sound could be viewed as a representation and exploration of Bowie’s character in the film, Thomas Jerome Newton, and the cover art which features an altered frame from the movie further implies the deep connection between this album and the film. After the release of Low, Bowie’s sent a copy to Roeg with a note that said: “This is what I wanted to do for the soundtrack. It would have been a wonderful score.”

The second precursor to this record is Iggy Pop’s debut studio album as a solo artist, The Idiot. The album was produced by Bowie, who is also credited as co-writer on all the releases eight tracks. It was a true collaboration between the pair and the techniques and styles used would be highly influential and utilised further by Bowie on Low. Iggy Pop, one of the pioneers of punk rock, by the mid-70s had become a serious heroin user and this led to the dissolution of his band the Stooges, their life performances were erratic, and he often had trouble even standing up on stage due to excessive drug abuse. In a bid to get clean Pop checked himself into the UCLA mental institution and Bowie was the only person who came to visit him. Bowie got Pop a recording contract with RCA Records and was determined the revitalise his career and produce an album with him, he did the same thing five years previous with Lou Reed and his landmark glam-rock masterpiece Transformer. The two moved to the Château d'Hérouville a recording studio in Hérouville, France and began work on what would become The Idiot and the beginnings of Low. The projects were kind of working simultaneously and when session musicians would ask which record, they were playing on Bowie would often refuse to answer them. Pop’s album could be seen as a dry run for Low, although that album is a lot more straightforward and less avant-garde art rock to the Bowie record it is still an essential part of the formation of the album’s sound. Iggy Pop was later quoted as saying:

 Bowie has a work pattern that recurs again and again. If he has an idea about an area of works that he wants to enter, as a first step, he’ll use side-projects or work for other people to gain experience and gain a little taste of water before he goes in and goes his. I think he used working with me that way also.

After completing The Idiot, Bowie and Pop travelled to West Berlin, they were joined by Bowie’s long-time producer Tony Visconti. Bowie was fascinated by Berlin, finding it a great place to escape where no one was bothered by his fame. The working title for the album is New Music: Night and Day, which does get across the stylistic differences between the two sides but unfortunately sound a little pompous, pretentious, and boring. It’s at this point that Brian Eno arrives and has a significant influence over the album’s second side. Musicians were played the abandoned Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack as a guide for the type of music they were trying to create, and most were not happy with the direction as it was unfamiliar and out of their experience. Bowie too was wary about how the record company would reaction to the album, reportedly saying: “We don’t know if this will ever be released. But I have to do this.”

The opening track, “Speed of Life”, is his first ever instrumental song on an album and with it’s heavy use of synthesisers you can tell this is going to be unlike any other Bowie record. The song was originally supposed to have lyrics but then Bowie thought it felt complete without them. The song features a crashing drum sound which ended up (along with the entire album) being hugely influential on later post-punk and new wave bands. Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris said: “When it came out, I thought Low was the sound of the future”. The distinctive drum sound was created with the Eventide Harmonizer, a pitch-shifting device, but when producer Tony Visconti was asked by interested musicians how he did it he would always just ask: “How do you think I did it?” and their answers would provide him with further inspiration for experimentation.

“Breaking Glass” is a short fragment of a song that highlights Bowie’s alienation and fragile mental state around this time. The song has no real verse or chorus structure and was written using William Burrough’s cut-up technique. It appears to represent someone in the midst of a manic episode. breaking glass on the floor after having drawn ritual imagery on carpet. Bowie stated this was based on a real event where he had drawn was the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in an occult ritual to conjure spirits. It’s worth noting that in the period leading up the recording of this album Bowie was incredibly paranoid and delusional often convinced that people weren’t who they said they were or that the places he was staying were haunted by ghosts. With all this in mind this track can be seen as a realisation of how far his addiction had gone. While on the previous album Station to Station Bowie was attempting to be connect with God, spirituality and the occult, on this record he is much more grounded in reality, able to step look at his actions from the outside and examine his own delusions. He’s on the road to recovery and self-reflective songs like “Breaking Glass” reflect that.

“What in the World” is the only song that also features Iggy Pop on vocals and was originally recorded for The Idiot. The lyrics deal with alienation and insecurity and through the character of a “little girl with grey eyes” Bowie was likely inspired by his own months of isolation and depression while living in L.A. The song features the heavy use of synthesizers utilising a ‘blip’ like sound that’s reminiscent of the type of 8-bit gaming sounds you’d hear years later in the Nintendo Entertainment System or in games like Pac-Man.

The lead single from the album is “Sound and Vision” it’s probably the closest thing to a conventional pop song on the album but with a lengthy instrumental introduction it is also not typical either. It continues the theme of the previous song dealing with Bowie’s mental state and need for recuperation. Bowie said: “It was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” The upbeat music is contrast to Bowie’s deep vocal register and examination of isolation and inspiration. The song was a success in Europe and peaked at number 3 in the UK charts but failed to make much of an impact in the U.S. In 2003 Bowie said:

"Sound and Vision" is a very sad song for me ... I was trying very hard to drag myself out of an awful period of my life. I was locked in a room in Berlin telling myself I was going to straighten up and not do drugs anymore. I was never going to drink again. Only some of it proved to be the case. It was the first time I knew I was killing myself and time to do something about my physical condition.

Talking about self-reflection, “Always Crashing in the Same Car” is a song expressing the frustration of always making the same mistakes. The narrator of the song recounts driving at high speed in circles around a hotel garage, cautiously checking for danger, yet still inevitably crashing. The song refers to a real-life incident that happened while Bowie was at the height of his cocaine addiction. While driving he spotted a drug dealer who he believed had ripped him off and in retaliation he repeatedly drove into his car. It’s a deep melancholy song about being stuck in a cycle of suffering that I think everyone can emphasise with from time to time.

The second single was the less successful “Be My Wife” which showcases an incredibly vulnerable and soul-baring Bowie as he describes his depression and loneliness. There’s an extreme anxiety running through the track. At this point, Bowie’s marriage to his then wife Angie was essentially over. Prior to the recording of the album, they briefly attempted to live together in Blonay, Switzerland, but it did not work out. It was during the recording of Low that they would meet for the final time to exchange legal documents for their divorce. Bowie later spoke about the unusually personal nature of the record, saying:

The music was literally expressing my physical and emotional state… and that was my worry. So the music was almost therapeutic. It was like, Oh yeah, we’ve made an album and it sounds like this. But it was a by-product of my life. It just sort of came out. I never spoke to the record company about it. I never talked to anybody about it. I just made this album… in a rehab state. A dreadful state really.

Side one closes with the instrumental track “A New Career in a New Town” a title which sums up his sense of displacement and discovery after leaving L.A. as well as the spirit of creative renewal that is cast across this entire record. The song features the harmonica which is an instrument seldom heard in Bowie songs. The instrumentation manages to perfectly capture a sense of anxiety, optimism, renewal, and loneliness. The perfect soundtrack to walking alone in a place you’ve never been, unsure of what’s to come next but still persevering onwards.

Side-two begins with “Warszawa” and from this point on things get a lot more ambient and experimental. Bowie said he wanted this track to evoke a bleak, emotive, almost religious atmosphere and that the second half of Low was his reaction to certain places with this a representation of his impression of Warsaw. This is the only track on the album where Brian Eno is credited as co-writer. Although it does contain some vocals they are not in any recognisable language and Bowie was inspired by the Polish composer Stanisław Hadyna. The influence of this track can be seen in the post-punk band Joy Division who were originally named Warsaw in reference to it, or on the work the soundtrack work done by Angelo Badalamenti for projects such as Twin Peaks.

“Art Decade” was intended to represent West-Berlin, a city cut off from its world, art, and culture, dying with no hope of retribution. It was Bowie’s reaction to seeing the East bloc and the way West Berlin survives in the midst of it all. He stated: “I couldn’t express it in words. Rather it required textures.” The slow song was intended to evoke a sense of melancholy as well as beauty, leaving an impression of a world caught just before it’s about to disappear. The piece was reminiscent of minimalist composer Philip Glass who Bowie had been aware of since at least 1971. Glass in turn was inspired by Bowie and later reworked the music in is 1992 Symphony No.1, often called the “Low” Symphony.

Written about the Berlin Wall, “Weeping Wall”, is the only track on the album completely performed by Bowie. The melody is taken from the folk ballad “Scarborough Fair” and it was intended to evoke the misery of the wall. This track was influenced by minimalist composer Steve Reich, particularly his work Music for 18 Musicians which Bowie attended the European premiere of in Berlin the year before. While the song is dark and brooding and does evoke a sense of misery there’s also a light upbeat nature to some of the instrumentation with xylophone and synthesizers keeping the energy up.

The closing track, “Subterraneans” was about the people that got caught in East Berlin after the separation, “hence the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was”. The song was first recorded in 1975 and intended for the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth and was later revived for this record. In relation that the movie you could imagine it as Thomas Jerome Newton’s mind frame as he remembers his wife and children back home on his alien planet, just like the many people in Berlin who had been separated from their family members, so close yet a whole world away. The lyrical interlude towards the end of the track doesn’t appear to really mean anything but it’s still incredibly emotive nonetheless, there’s a yearning for something in it. The breakdown in language is something that can be seen across the entire album something that is quite relevant when you take Berlin into consideration, a breakdown in communication, culture, politics, and society. It’s something that’s quite difficult to put into a coherent narrative so you just feel it through this haunting ambient music.

Low is an incredibly original and beautiful album and so many post-punk and indie bands are incredibly indebted to it. It inspired everything from Joy Division, to Radiohead, to Arcade Fire. It’s interesting that the experimental work Bowie did the late 70s had such a huge impact on the alternative music landscape of the 1980s because by the 80’s Bowie had moved away entirely from this style and into a transformed once again into a more mainstream pop act. Low was a huge risk when it was first released in 1977, no other rockstar was embracing experimental and minimal styles in the same way and Bowie’s record label were reluctant to even release the album. Once record executive apparently told Bowie he would personally buy him a house in Philadelphia if he would only go back there to record Young Americans II. It was originally planned for release in November 1976, but the label said it was “distinctly unpalatable” for the Christmas market and it was eventually released in January 1977 to almost no promotion or marketing.

Upon release it divided critical opinion with some seeing it as pretentious navel-gazing experimentation, and others lauding it as the emergence of an exciting new sound. In retrospect, it’s regarded as one of Bowie’s best and most influential works. For me, it was probably the first experimental album I ever got properly into and opened the floodgates to whole world of music. As a music fan Low can lead you into the post-punk of Joy Division, the dreamy ambient of Brian Eno, experimental krautrock of Kraftwerk, or even into the world of minimal composition with works from Steve Reich or Philip Glass. It really is a ground-breaking album and as a young music obsessive Low felt like a revelation.

Low ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [10/10]