Queen Bitch Channels the Reich

NICK KENT: “Most of the real madness of the time was played out behind the locked doors and gated driveways of remotely located luxury mansions once owned by movie stars from the silent-picture age that no one seemed to remember the names of.  Bowie was conspicuously absent from all the clubs and social functions. He’d first found fame as a flamboyant ‘look at me’ kind of fellow but now he seemed to be invaded by a Howard Hughes-sized craving for self-seclusion. It made sense. He’d been going through many ch-ch-changes of late and, like a snake, had been shedding a lot of dead skin. Musically speaking, he’d daringly jettisoned glam only to plausibly reinvent himself as a white soul boy fronting an upmarket disco revue. His physical appearance had undergone a startling transformation too. Where once he’d resembled an alien transsexual from the planet Outrageous, he now affected the dress code of an emaciated hop-head straight out of a Damon Runyon novel set in the McCarthyite fifties. Every time Bowie appeared in public that year, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an audition for ‘Guys and Dolls.’”

BARNEY HOSKYNS: “If John Bonham was a schizophrenic animal and Keith Moon a manic-depressive jester, Bowie by the spring of 1975 had become a skeletal vampire, virtually burned out on cocaine.  To put his health in perspective, he was in an even worse state than Iggy Pop, who in June committed himself to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA.”

DAVID BOWIE: “There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days.  I collected a motley crew of people who would keep turning up at the house – a lot of dealers, real scum…. LA is the scariest movie ever written.  That fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

KEVIN CHRISTMAS: “So this is all strangely paranoid.  I’ll never forget he had this double-sided razor blade with which he’s chopping out lines.  When he stuck his finger on a little bindle of coke and held it up to my nose I saw how much his hand was shaking, and the meaning was, I want this stuff so much, I will risk severe personal injury for it.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “The Sunset Strip area, which had, according to the writer Domenic Priore, given birth a decade earlier to a ‘fascinating artistic Mecca,’ now had a seedy, insidious feel, its folk-rock coffeehouses replaced by shops selling occult paraphernalia… Many stories about Bowie at this time are tied to what was, undeniably, a deep obsession with black magic, which only exacerbated his already troubling paranoia. Among the most regularly cited of these stories suggests that Bowie kept his urine in jar in his fridge, for fear that some malevolent magician or other might use it to put a hex on him… More telling are the brief allusions to days and nights spent ‘huddled in a room drawing pentangles, burning candles, chanting spells.’ According to Angela Bowie, any suggestion that her husband ought to curb his drug intake was routinely met with a curt ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ and a retreat into his locked bedroom, swiftly followed by ‘sniffing noises’ and more time spent drawing occult symbols in the dark.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “The spark of Bowie’s renewed and more obsessive interest in the occult seems to have been a meeting with the underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger. By the time of this meeting, David had taken to not sleeping for as many as six days at a time… and was existing on a diet of milk, green and red peppers, and cocaine, which had caused him to become painfully thin… Ever more fearful of what evil-doers might attempt to inflict upon him, he wore a large gold crucifix at all times… He is even reported to have regarded Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, another musician with an interest in Crowley and black magic, as a ‘malevolent force out to get him.’ Where once he would merely sing about the Nietzschean ‘Supermen,’ he was now reportedly building 15-foot polyethylene sculptures of them in his back yard.”

GLENN HUGHES: “Our conversations were scary.  This black magic theme crept in, and my house was near where the Sharon Tate murders were; he was convinced the whole Manson family was still around, and I found he’s hid all the knives in my house.  Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was learning all about cocaine psychosis – which I would go through myself soon.”

BARNEY HOSKYNS: “If John Bonham was a schizophrenic animal and Keith Moon a manic-depressive jester, Bowie by the spring of 1975 had become a skeletal vampire, virtually burned out on cocaine. To put his health in perspective, he was in an even worse state than Iggy Pop, who in June committed himself to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA.”

DAVID BOWIE: “There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days. I collected a motley crew of people who would keep turning up at the house – a lot of dealers, real scum…. LA is the scariest movie ever written. That fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

KEVIN CHRISTMAS: “So this is all strangely paranoid. I’ll never forget he had this double-sided razor blade with which he’s chopping out lines. When he stuck his finger on a little bindle of coke and held it up to my nose I saw how much his hand was shaking, and the meaning was, I want this stuff so much, I will risk severe personal injury for it.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “The Sunset Strip area, which had, according to the writer Domenic Priore, given birth a decade earlier to a ‘fascinating artistic Mecca,’ now had a seedy, insidious feel, its folk-rock coffeehouses replaced by shops selling occult paraphernalia… Many stories about Bowie at this time are tied to what was, undeniably, a deep obsession with black magic, which only exacerbated his already troubling paranoia. Among the most regularly cited of these stories suggests that Bowie kept his urine in jar in his fridge, for fear that some malevolent magician or other might use it to put a hex on him… More telling are the brief allusions to days and nights spent ‘huddled in a room drawing pentangles, burning candles, chanting spells.’ According to Angela Bowie, any suggestion that her husband ought to curb his drug intake was routinely met with a curt ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ and a retreat into his locked bedroom, swiftly followed by ‘sniffing noises’ and more time spent drawing occult symbols in the dark.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “The spark of Bowie’s renewed and more obsessive interest in the occult seems to have been a meeting with the underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger. By the time of this meeting, David had taken to not sleeping for as many as six days at a time… and was existing on a diet of milk, green and red peppers, and cocaine, which had caused him to become painfully thin… Ever more fearful of what evil-doers might attempt to inflict upon him, he wore a large gold crucifix at all times… He is even reported to have regarded Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, another musician with an interest in Crowley and black magic, as a ‘malevolent force out to get him.’ Where once he would merely sing about the Nietzschean ‘Supermen,’ he was now reportedly building 15-foot polyethylene sculptures of them in his back yard.”

GLENN HUGHES: “Our conversations were scary. This black magic theme crept in, and my house was near where the Sharon Tate murders were; he was convinced the whole Manson family was still around, and I found he’s hid all the knives in my house. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was learning all about cocaine psychosis – which I would go through myself soon.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “David liked my apartment on 20th Street, and he also liked Norman Fisher’s coke, something for which he’d recently acquired an insatiable appetite and for which I had, of course, hooked him up. And since my days were winding down at Mainman, I guess David felt comfortable getting high with me and opening up about anything and everything that was on his mind. He spent many an evening, often an all-nighter, sitting in one of my canary-yellow enameled wicker chairs, doing lines, drinking milk (he never ate at all during this period), and telling me one crazy story after another — Defries and Adolf Hitler were buddies … Lou Reed was the devil …he himself was from another planet and was being held prisoner on earth — going on and on about power, symbols, communication, music, the occult, Aleister Crowley, and Merlin the Magician. I never did any of David’s coke (and, what’s more, he never offered). I just sat there, smoked my pot, sipped my Café Bustelo, and got totally into his rap. This was probably the period when I was most in love with him.”

CAMERON CROWE: “Suddenly – always suddenly – David is on his feet and rushing to a nearby picture window. He thinks he has seen a body fall from the sky. ‘I have to do this,’ he says, pulling a shade down on the window. A ball-point penned star has been crudely drawn on the window. Below it is the word ‘Aum.’ Bowie lights a black candle on his dresser and immediately blows it out, to leave a thin trail of smoke floating upward. ‘Don’t let me scare the pants off you… it’s only protective. I’ve been getting a little trouble from… the neighbors.’”

GARY LACHMAN: “Bowie alluded to Cameron Crowe that some visitors from the other side had turned up unannounced and strange nightmares plagued him so much that a friend gave him a gold cross. Hedging his bets, Bowie asked for a mezuzah, a magical talisman that Orthodox Jews employ to keep demons at bay.”

AVA CHERRY: “I remember him staying up for forty-eight hours learning how to work a video machine, or reading fifty books at a time about one subject, stacking them up and reading them for days.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I wasn’t involved in devil worship, no, it was pure, straightforward, old-fashioned magic. I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called ‘Psychic Self Defense.’ You had to run around the room getting bits of string and old crayons and draw funny things on the wall, and I took it all most seriously, haha! I drew gateways into different dimensions, and I’m quite sure that, for myself, I really walked into other worlds. I drew things on walls and just walked through them, and saw what was on the other side.”

GLENN HUGHES: “He –and this is glamorizing it – did use the drugs to enlarge his capabilities in every dimension. It really magnified his intelligence, if you will. But it had its way with him.”

ANGELA BOWIE: “David said he was with the devil, or more specifically, that he was about to be with the devil. He was in a house somewhere and three people, a warlock and two witches, were holding him for some terrible Satan-related reason he kept trying, very incoherently, to explain. He wanted to get away, he said, but he didn’t have any money and he didn’t know where he was, and anyway the witches wouldn’t let him leave. The deal, he said, was that those people wanted his semen. They wanted to hold him and cast a spell over him – so that he could inseminate one of the witches in a ritual ceremony on All Saints’ Eve, and thereby bring an offspring of Satan into the world.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “After not hearing from him for a month or two, I was excited when David finally called. But when I heard how freaked out he was, I instinctively reverted to my subservient role with him and patiently listened. He proceeded to tell me that a hex meant for him had been placed on Lippman’s house and that a powerful black magic force was pulling him deeper and deeper into a web of pure evil – something to do with a group of LA girls trying to have a ‘devil baby’ with him. He said he desperately needed ‘a white witch to undo the spell.’ Of course, my first thought was, well, maybe if you stopped having sex with them… But I held my tongue and gave him the number for Walli Elmlark, New York’s most celebrated witch at the time, though I’m not really sure just how white her magic actually was. I never knew what came of all of that, but the spell apparently got reversed and turned into good luck or something, because, as far as I know, no devil baby was ever conceived, and by that summer David had his first #1 hit in the States – ‘Fame.’”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Over 1975 David embarked on a journey that would take him into the heart of psychic darkness. One key text in this journey was Trevor Ravenscroft’s ‘The Spear of Destiny.’ Published in 1973, the book explored Hitler’s and Himmler’s harnessing of occult powers, notably those of the Holy Grail and a partner artifact, the lance that pierced Christ’s side. Other Bowie influences almost certainly included the hugely fashionable ‘The Morning of the Magicians,’ by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Together with works by Crowley and his acolytes, these formed the core of Bowie’s reading list at the time.”

AVA CHERRY: “People were saying that Jimmy was Aleister Crowley’s apprentice or something. David intimated to me that he wasn’t afraid of Jimmy Page, and started reading all these books about the occult, and would sit there for three days at a time reading. Obviously, the candy had a lot to do with it.”

GLENN HUGHES: “He would watch a lot of old black and white movies over and over again. Neverending Nazi stuff, which he’d watch with this constant frown on his face. I couldn’t analyze what he read or saw, I wasn’t capable – his brain was simply on a tangent to everyone else’s.”

MICK WALL: “Bowie was convinced that Jimmy Page’s study of Crowley had given him an especially strong aura – a magnetic sphere composed of three fields or bands of different colors that surrounds the body. He invited Page to the house he was then living in on 20th St.”

TONY ZANETTA: “Though he was his polite self, David was wary of Page. Occasionally during the evening, the conversation touched on the subject of the occult. Whenever the power of the guitarist’s aura was mentioned, Page remained silent but smiled inscrutably. It seemed that he did believe he had the power to control the universe.”

MICK WALL: “Eventually, Page’s ‘aura’ so rankled Bowie he began to seriously lose his cool. ‘I’d like to leave,’ he snapped. Jimmy simply sat there smiling, still saying nothing. Pointing to an open window in the room, Bowie hissed through gritted teeth: ‘Why don’t you leave by the window?’ Again, Page merely sat there smiling, saying nothing, staring right at Bowie as though speaking to him telepathically. Eventually, Jimmy got up and strode out, slamming the door behind him, leaving Bowie quaking in his boots. The next time they bumped into each other at a party, Bowie immediately left the room. Shortly after, claims Zanetta, Bowie insisted the house on 20th St. be exorcised ‘because of the belief it had become overrun with satanic demons whom Crowley’s disciples had summoned straight from hell…’”

AVA CHERRY: “By the time he was hanging out with Glenn Hughes in LA, in the hills, things were quite negative. He was staying up for two or three days. After he’d been up for so long, he’d be tired and irritable, and intolerant of stupidity. I remember him putting on Fritz Lang movies, and was like, ‘Can’t you stop fidgeting? You could learn something here!’”

MICK FARREN: “Bowie was a bit of a poser. Everyone was. Except where some people would read a book jacket and bullshit, David would bullshit, then read the book quietly one Sunday afternoon.”

ANGELA BOWIE: “David’s serial preoccupations didn’t gain him much insight or even real knowledge. He could send Corinne out for all the UFO books in print, and imagine himself to be tuned right in to the alien thing, but then he wouldn’t read the books. He could get obsessed with Howard Hughes, but the nature of his obsession wasn’t that of a serious student. It was that of a character vampire; he wanted to be Howard Hughes, or at least to be seen as a figure resembling his image of Howard Hughes.”

AVA CHERRY: “I felt kind of afraid. David would talk about ghosts and I didn’t know how to take it. One day we were talking, he started to cry and had a glass in his hand. And it suddenly shattered. He is an intense person, there was this energy… you read about people who sit in a chair and self-combust.”

ANGELA BOWIE: “At a certain point in David’s exorcism of our Doheny Drive house, the pool began to bubble. It bubbled vigorously – perhaps ‘thrashed’ is a better term – in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving air filters or the like. On the bottom of the pool was a large shadow, or stain which had not been there before the ritual began. It was in the shape of a beast of the underworld, it reminded me of those twisted, tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of medieval cathedrals. Subsequent tenants haven’t been able to remove that shadow. Even though the pool has been painted over a number of times, the shadow has always come back.”

IGGY POP: “Sometimes I would go over to his house for a couple of days. There would be books all over the floor and Dennis Hopper stopping by – and David always had ideas. He was about to do ‘Man Who Fell To Earth,’ and he had a great book, a slim volume about a group of people for the government who faked a Mars landing in a TV studio, a wonderful little idea for a movie, he was keen on talking about that. Then he had an idea for a rock-and-roll movie in which I would play a character called Catastrophe. I indulged him in that ‘cause, well… I am open to a lot of things.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “When Bowie split with Defries at the beginning of 1975, he and his girlfriend Ava Cherry moved into an apartment right down the block from me on 20th Street. I only stopped by a couple of times: once for a cup of tea and a delightful little game David liked to play – you named your favorite colors from the different stages of your life and he’d play you the corresponding tracks from Ken Nordine’s album ‘Colors.’ It was lovely, but it didn’t last long. By spring he was living at Michael Lippman’s house in LA, preparing for his role in the Nicolas Roeg film ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and getting a little too far out there on the combination of cocaine and Southern California.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “Starring in ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ came as a much needed respite for Bowie. By all accounts, he was in much better mental and physical shape during the three months he spent as Thomas Jerome Newton in New Mexico than he had been behind the shutters of his various Los Angeles homes. Bowie spoke of how he found New Mexico to be ‘so clean and pure – and puritanical, too – not just the people, but the land… This is the way I’d like the rest of America to be.’ When not required on set, he spent his time back at the Albuquerque Hilton Inn with a small entourage that included Coco Schwab and, on occasion, his four-year-old son Zowie, learning to use a 16mm newsreel camera given to him by Nicholas Roeg or jotting down fragments of ideas for films and books (including an aborted attempt at an autobiography, ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’). He also read avidly, as ever, having apparently brought 400 books with him for the 11-week shoot.”

NICOLAS ROEG: “[When Bowie did cocaine on set] I did not do or say anything. You can’t reason someone out of anything. I’m not into the guilt thing or trying to cure anybody of our humanity – everybody has a sense of shame, guilt, secret happiness, accusation, or praise. There are certain things I wouldn’t want to know about someone anyway, and I wouldn’t want them to know certain things about me. It all goes back to this idea of exposing yourself. You have to live with yourself first.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I acted or non-acted as best as I could in that film. It required non-acting because the character of Newton that I played is a very cold, unexpressive person. The thing he learns on Earth is emotion, which comes hard to him and reduces him to an alcoholic. I’d been offered a lot of scripts but I chose this one because it was the only one where I didn’t have to sing or look like David Bowie. Now I think David Bowie looks like Newton. One thing that Nic Roeg is good at doing is seducing people into a role, and he seduced me completely. He told me after we’d finished it would take me a long time to get out of the role and he was dead right. After four months playing the role, I was Newton for six months.”

CANDY CLARK: “He was so perfect for the role that it was very easy to imagine he was from another planet – he was beautiful, really at the height of his beauty. Really thick hair, dyed that lovely color, and his skin was just gorgeous.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I think the only freedom I was given was in choosing how this character would dress. That was it. That was the only thing I could claim at all, that I chose my wardrobe and that I put in again – I had to – that Japanese influence, something that I felt had something to do with my very weak analogy between spacemen or a spaceman and what Westerners regard the Orientals as: an archetype kind of concept.”

AVA CHERRY: “I was very impressed. I didn’t know he could act. He was the alien, as he was in real life. I remember him saying to me, ‘See how we can influence the masses?’ And that was true. When he did ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth,’ his fans were like ‘Maybe he really is an alien…’ I felt sympathy for that spaceman. It was like a very strange parody of David.”

GLENN HUGHES: “I heard ‘Station to Station’ and I thought it was brilliant, absolutely mindblowing… But I was amazed how he could come up with that, having been in complete cocaine psychosis.”

 

 

JEAN ROOK: “Bowie looked terribly ill. Thin as a stick insect. And corpse pale, as if his lifeblood had all run up into his flaming hair.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I didn’t really use drugs for hedonistic purposes. I would work for days in a row without sleep. It wasn’t a joyful, euphoric kind of thing. I was driving myself to a point of insanity.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “Such was the level of Bowie’s drug use at the time that he now says he recalls next to nothing of the making of ‘Station to Station,’ claiming only to know that the record was cut in Los Angeles because he has subsequently read about it. Of the time spent recording the album, Bowie says that he remembers only one specific incident: screaming an approximation of the feedback sound he wanted for the beginning of the title track at guitarist Earl Slick, and ‘telling him to take a Chuck Berry riff and play it all the way through the solo.’”

DAVID BOWIE: “If you really want to lose all your friends and all of the relationships that you ever held dear, [cocaine] is the drug to do it with. Cocaine severs any link you have with another human being. Maintaining is the problem. You retain a superficial hold on reality so that you can get through the things that you know are absolutely necessary for your survival. But when that starts to break up, which inevitably it does - around 1975 everything was starting to break up. I would work at songs for hours and hours and days and days and then realize that I had done absolutely nothing.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “He retained his wardrobe from ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and his striking dyed-red, center-parted hair do. His character’s air of lonely dislocation and icy paranoia stuck with him, too, and clearly informed Bowie’s next and final onstage incarnation, the Thin White Duke.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I hate weak things. I can’t stand weakness. I wanted to hit everybody that came along wearing love beads.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “The Thin White Duke, a cruel, Aryan crooner whom Bowie later summed up as ‘a would-be romantic with no emotion at all…’ Instead of a warm-up act, attendees of the Station to Station shows were treated to a screening of ‘Un Chien Andalou,’ a 1922 art film by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, famed for the sequence in which a razor blade slices through an eyeball, backed by the sounds of Kraftwerk’s recent ‘Radio Activity’ LP.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Bowie’s arresting, glamorous Thin White Duke persona was an intrinsic part of his appeal, especially because this was the first time he’d hit the stage in Britain since Ziggy’s farewell. The contrast could not have been more pronounced: Ziggy’s femininity versus the Duke’s masculine 1930s neatness and fetching Weimar haircut. The hint of depravity behind the crisp white shirt and waistcoat was erotic. Perhaps his most drop-dead glamorous look to date, Bowie’s European superman persona was carefully judged; it signaled his focus over the coming years, which was to build up a fan base on the Continent.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I wanted to use a new kind of staging, and I think this staging will become one of the most important ever. It will affect every kind of rock’n’roll art from now on, because it’s the most stabilized move that I’ve ever seen in rock’n’roll. I’ve reverted to pure Brechtian theatre and I’ve never seen Brechtian theatre use liked this since Morrison and The Doors, and even then Morrison never used white light like I do. I think it looks like a corrupted version of 1930s German theatre, what with the waistcoat, which has always been a favourite with me. I should have had a watch-chain to make it perfect. I’m trying to put over the idea of the European movement with the Dali film and playing Kraftwerk over the speakers.”

IGGY POP: “The guy has a lot of psychic stamina – he was perfectly able to go out and do the gigs, drive the entire continent by car, then go out to a club after almost every one until four in the morning, and do all the other things. And he never showed bad form, even once.”

DAVID BOWIE: “People aren’t very bright, you know. They say they want freedom, but when they get the chance, they pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler, because he would march into a room and music and lights would come on at strategic moments. It was rather like a rock ‘n’ roll concert.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “At the end of March, when Bowie’s ‘Station to Station’ tour hit New York, Norman Fisher threw him the most lavish and exclusive soiree. The whole top of Norman’s mantelpiece was completely covered, like a snowy Christmas landscape, with the finest cocaine. And we all cut little paths through it with straws. It was the most decadent and generous display of refreshments I had ever seen offered by a host in my life. Naturally, I was happy to encounter David there and to have the chance to talk with him again. But when I approached him in my usual adoring manner, he muttered something abrasive sounding in German and quickly turned and walked away. I just stood there for a moment, hurt and in a state of dismay.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I had indeed been bombed out for quite a long time. This was all an escape plan heralded by a couple of friends of mine – I won’t say who they are – who helped me get out of America and back to Europe, whatever. That whole Station to Station tour was done under duress. I was out of my mind totally, completely crazed. Really. But the main thing I was functioning on was – as far as that whole thing about Hitler and rightism was concerned – it was mythology. I was in the depths of mythology. I had found King Arthur. It was not as you probably know because… I mean, this whole racist thing, which came up quite inevitably and rightly. But – and I know this sounds terribly naïve – but none of that had actually occurred to me, inasmuch as I’d been working and still do work with black musicians for the last six or seven years. And we’d all talk about it together – about the Arthurian period, about the magical side of the whole Nazi campaign, and about the mythology involved. All that stuff was flying around, buzzing around the skies. I could see it. Everywhere I looked there were these great demons of the past, demons of the future on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane and all that… I was in a haze of mythology. Mixed up too of course were my own fucking characters. The Thin White Duke – throwing him, it was like kicking him. There was such an addictive thing about what was happened there that actually being able to send a lot of those demons back to their – well, wherever it is they live. Altogether, none if it is something to be dealt with unless you’re in a particularly stable frame of mind.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “On the way up to Russia, the Bowie party was detained at the border town of Brest whilst their luggage was searched by Russian Customs officials, who were reported to have confiscated Bowie’s latest controversial reading material: books about Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister For Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and by Albert Speer, the so-called ‘first architect’ of the Third Reich.”

DAVID BOWIE: “My other fascination was with the Nazis and their search for the Holy Grail. There was this theory that they had come to England at some point before the war to Glastonbury to try to find the Holy Grail. It was this Arthurian need, this search for a mythological link with God. But somewhere along the line it was perverted by what I was reading and what I was drawn to. And it was nobody’s fault but my own.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “The Moscow journey was packed with unforgettable moments. Once the small group – David, Iggy, Andrew Kent, Corinne, and Pat Gibbons – reached Poland, the train clattered more slowly through an increasingly bleak landscape, and the five voyagers spent hours gazing at buildings pockmarked by machine-gun bullets and the gaunt remains of towns still shattered by bomb damage. The train stopped every now and then to pick up bottles of brown beer or the soup and peas that were the only foodstuffs available. As their train pulled up alongside a goods train in Warsaw, they witnessed a gray-clad worker throwing lumps of coal up from a flatcar, piece by piece, while sleet rattled against their windows. An unforgettably dreary image, it would later be evoked in the haunting instrumental ‘Warszawa.’”

 

IGGY POP: “John Lennon was very helpful to people dirtier and poorer than him at certain key times. Bowie liked what I was doing, and had an interesting dialogue with a sort of a representative composite American of the kind he could relate to. A little bit sullen teen, a little bit Neal Cassady, a little bit Jack Kerouac.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Since my teenage years I had obsessed on the angst-ridden, emotional work of the expressionists and Berlin had been their spiritual home.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I psychically opened a wardrobe door, mentally put all my characters into the wardrobe, and left Los Angeles.”

LEGS MCNEIL: “Glitter rock was about decadence: platform shoes and boys in eye makeup, David Bowie and androgyny. Rich rock stars living their lives from Christopher Isherwood’s ‘Berlin Stories,’ you know, Sally Bowles hanging out with drag queens, drinking champagne for breakfast and having ménages a trois, while the Nazis slowly grab the power.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Life in LA had left me with an overwhelming sense of foreboding. I had approached the brink of drug-induced calamity one too many times and it was essential to take positive action. Berlin was one of the few cities where I could move around in virtual anonymity. I was going broke, it was cheap to live. For some reason, Berliners just didn’t care. Well, not about an English rock singer… It took two years in Berlin to really cleanse the system. I’d have days where things were moving in the room and this was when I was totally straight!”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Berlin offered a better class of decadence, one that focused their energies rather than sapping them… Schoneberg, too, was an attractively anonymous district. There was a sprinkling of bars and bookstores, and a market centered around St. Matthias Kirche… In the mornings Iggy would take long walks on his own, sometimes wandering for up to eight miles, to the point where he eventually claimed he’d covered every inch of the city on foot… At night, Iggy and David would often eat at Kreutzberg’s Café Exil, overlooking the Landwehr canal, or hang out in the smoke-filled back room, which was invariably full of intellectuals and beats.”

ANGIE BOWIE: “A lot of people love the idea of going and making nice to the people you’ve defeated so you can treat them like slaves. That was David’s going-to-Berlin story: ‘Let me lie with you in case there’s something we didn’t take from you that I haven’t learned yet!’ – it’s pathetic.”

DAVID BOWIE: “It’s such an ambiguous place. It’s so hard to distinguish between the ghosts and the living.”

 

THOMAS SEABROOK: “Bowie now read and enthused – in typically vociferous fashion – about art, literature, and classical music; painting, previously an intermittent distraction, became a full-time hobby. Many of his own artworks – which included a giant expressionist portrait of the Japanese author and nihilist Yukio Mishima – hung from the walls of his Berlin apartment… He could drift in and out of roadside cafes and restaurants, visit galleries, drink himself into oblivion in working men’s clubs and transvestite cabaret bars, all the while keeping the requisite low profile, easing himself slowly back from the near self-destruction brought about in Los Angeles – ‘the most vile piss-pot in the world.’”

STEPHEN DALTON: “Berlin 1976. Strung out and fiercely paranoid, David Bowie is convinced he has been royally screwed by a coke supplier over a deal. Cruising the city’s main drag, the Kurfurstendamm, in the rusty old open-topped Mercedes bought for him by faithful sidekicks Iggy ‘Jimmy’ Pop and Corrine ‘Coco’ Schwab, he spots the dealer in his car. Seething and possessed, Bowie rams his prey’s car mercilessly. Then he rams it again. And again. Then again and again and again. ‘He looked around every second and I could see he was mortally terrified for his life,’ Bowie would later recall. ‘I rammed him for a good five to ten minutes. Nobody stopped me. Nobody did anything.’ Bowie finally comes to his senses and quits the crash scene before it gets ugly, but that same night he reaches ‘some kind of spiritual impasse.’ He finds himself in a hotel garage, his foot jammed on the gas, racing around in circles at lunatic speed. The frazzled star decides ‘This is so Kirk Douglas in that film where he lets go of the steering wheel.’ So then, of course, he lets go of the wheel. But just as he does, the Mercedes runs out of petrol and splutters to a standstill. ‘Oh God,’ Bowie sobs, ‘This is the story of my life!’ But he’s wrong. Because instead of running on empty, Bowie will now write a harrowing confessional called ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car.’ And instead of dying at his peak, he will pick up the shattered pieces of his mind and distil them into the three most cathartic, challenging, influential, and plain magical albums of his career. And instead of becoming just another 70s rock casualty, Bowie will fuse punk with electronica, black magic with white noise, amphetamine psychosis with spiritual healing. And, as a by-product of this process, he will accidentally invent the future of rock.”

IGGY POP: “The Wall was beautiful. It created a wonderful island, the same way that volcanoes create islands in the sea. And beyond that, the desolated nothingness of possible mine fields and then in the background the silhouetted skyline of some buildings… dark, dismal, and depressing.”

ANDREW KENT: “We went through Checkpoint Charlie and drove around East Berlin in David’s limo. It was the President of Sierra Leone’s old Mercedes 600 and it had one of those windows where you could stand and wave to the crowd. He had a great driver, Tony Mascia, and we went out at night and drove real fast. David and Iggy loved it, they were out all the time.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “There’s seven days in a week, Iggy would later recall: two for binging, two for recovery, and three 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.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “On April 10, nightclub entertainer Romy Haag turned up for Bowie’s show at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle. Nearly six feet tall and drop-dead gorgeous, Romy’s deliciously indefinable sexuality embodied the vibrant, fragile glamor of prewar Berlin that Christopher Isherwood had so compellingly recorded in the books that David had been reading in the last few weeks. Born Edouard Frans Verbaarsschott in The Hague, Romy had opened her own nightclub, Chez Romy Haag, just two years earlier and established herself as Berlin’s most glamorous woman despite the historical accident of having been born a man. Romy brought a posse of her dancers and entertainers to the show; they made a dazzling spectacle and that, according to Haag, was that.”

IGGY POP: “There were local characters you would meet… and instead of the constant, insane, mindless American drug culture, there was an artsy-crafty weekend drug culture. So on the weekends, you’d go meet an eccentric character who was interested in the arts and knew other people, and maybe you’d have a little coke and get drunk and go till four in the morning to three or four clubs, which would run the gamut from.. there was a bit rock club called Tribe House, and it would go right down to places that didn’t open until breakfast, the full-on Berlin nightlife.”

STEPHEN DALTON: “Romy Haag remembers Iggy and David stumbling into her bar ‘coked up and wasted.’ British paratrooper Stuart Mackenzie, who was briefly Bowie’s informal bodyguard in Berlin, later witnessed Iggy snorting coke from a vase while David would ‘booze, booze, booze’ until he threw up or collapsed.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “The band rehearsed at UFA studios, the giant, semi-abandoned movie lot that still contained filing cabinets packed with Nazi-era paperwork, starting at around eleven or twelve at night and continuing until five in the morning. After hours, one favored haunt was a dark club named the Café Kees, its dance floor enclosed by paneled booths equipped with phones, which had, according to Tony Sales, been used by SS officers to arrange assignations with their mistresses back in the 1930s.”

TONY VISCONTI: “After work at Hansa, we’d go to Romy Haag’s or some dungeon club. It wasn’t really a gay thing, there were kids there as well as grown-ups, it was just part of their cabaret culture. Even if you couldn’t speak German you could get off on the cabaret. Romy was about six feet tall and couldn’t possibly have been a woman, which added to the mystique, and we’d always get the best table.”

HUNT SALES: “The atmosphere was like the cover of the Doors record, ‘Strange Days,’ full of these bohemian bums. I remember sitting at – I think – the Tribe Bar one particular night, and there was a midget on top of the bar, dancing with a girl.”

DAVID BOWIE: “That initial period of living in Berlin produced ‘Low.’ It was like, ‘Isn’t it great being on your own? Let’s just pull down the blinds and fuck ‘em all.’ Berlin has the strange ability to make you write only the important things. Anything else, you don’t mention – and in the end you produce ‘Low.’”

PAUL TRYNKA: “It was Hansa Studios that best embodied Berlin’s grandeur and menace. The main building, on the Kothenerstrasse, had been built as the Meistersaal in 1910, a beautiful, stern clubhouse showcasing the skills of Berlin’s master masons. But in 1976, it looked like a forlorn wreck in a forgotten sector of the city. Left derelict throughout most of the Second World War, the building’s elegant Ionic pillars were bullet scarred, the lofty pediment blown off, the upper windows bricked up with pigeons roosting within, and a quarter of its courtyard block had simply collapsed. All around, streets retained their gap-toothed look, and from the second story of the building, the section of the Berlin wall leading up to Potsdamer Platz was clearly visible.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Hansa was a Weimar ballroom utilized by the Gestapo in the ‘30s for their own little musical soirees…”

TONY VISCONTI: “This was clearly an ex-war zone and now it was an international boundary, which was really scary. We recorded five hundred feet from barbed wire, and a tall tower where you could see gun turrets, with foreign soldiers looking at us with binoculars… Everything said we shouldn’t be making a record here.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Again, I must stress that this is a bit romantic. There was a café in the Hansa building, run by an ex-boxing champion – my painting ‘Champion of the World’ is a portrait of him. We’d either have a lunch and dinner there or order up. But the egg thing is also true. I was eating extremely well as my drug intake was practically zero. I’d eat a couple of raw eggs to start the day or finish it, with pretty big meals in between. Lots of meat and veg, thanks Mum. Brian would start his day with a cup of boiling water, into which he’d cut huge lumps of garlic. He was no fun to do backing vocals with on the same mic.”

BRIAN ENO: “Bowie gets into a very peculiar state when he’s working. He doesn’t eat. It used to strike me as very paradoxical that two comparatively well-known people would be staggering home at 6am, and he’d break a raw egg into his mouth and that was his food for the day, virtually. It was slummy. We’d sit around the kitchen table tired and a bit fed up – me with a bowl of crummy German cereal, him with albumen running down his shirt.”

DAVID 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.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally. But overall, I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from ‘Low.’”

PATTI SMITH: “I had the fortunes with me. 10/20. Rimbaud's birthday. I was in Koln. So were the several young and lusty terrorists. The tone of the country was meditative, metallic. A boy walked in. He had an offering in a wax bag. He said it was the new Bowie album. I was very happy. I was nervous and alien in this town and the record was a connection. It was also his contribution toward the raising of souls in this domestic domain. The boy put side 1 on. I had difficulty focusing. Being among others I was unable to relax and submit into a groove of total aural adventure. It was also impossible to glitter and obliterate before a trio of languorous young men. I was expecting a thrill though. Since ‘Young Americans’ I have been a quiet yet ecstatic fan. ‘Station to Station’ inspired ‘Radio Ethiopia.’ Message units are sprayed liberally between the buds of poppies. When ‘Low’ hit I was in a period of disgrace. Of total immobility. ‘Low.’ The fall and potential rising of Thomas Jerome Newton. The soundtrack of Bowie's escape into film. A backdrop for months of head-motion. ‘Low’ provided a state of connective id-mutual non-action. Of dream and beyond into creation. A stiff neck person can indeed inter/enter the wrath of the creator. And so I was remembering. I was sliding into the dark backward. Revisiting all the carnal landscapes of the bruised interior.”

PATTI SMITH: “The boys were discussing Bowie's pronunciations. In Koln ‘Heroes’ is sung in sectioned German. I asked them what they thought of Bowie's interpretation. They said it was not rock n roll. It was cabaret. Behind my shades I can imagine him. There in Berlin. In the abandoned section. I imagine him stumbling thru old boxes and props in the street. I imagine him in love with the whole world or totally dead. I imagine the last show of Thomas Jerome Newton escaping into life. We are interrupted by a profile. Bowie-the-neo-somnambulist enters the atelier of Hugo Ball. He is the angels of Kandinsky. He is the incredibly spiritual phony. A member of a most expiring race - an actor. Specifically designed for the silent screen. One with the conceit and innocence of the true silent actor. In ‘Sons of the Silent Age’ he is the metropolis Valentino- very mythic very manic and very misunderstood. Harmonious gossip resounds. Everyone is murmuring German.”

PATTI SMITH: “His new work is not immediately accessible but neither was ‘Exile on Main Street.’ I got off the plane and went downtown and bought the record. I wanted to keep the feel of being in transit. New York-Koln. I don't usually buy a record unless I'm in love (Stones) or in a state of hot suspense (‘Idiot’). I listened to the record for 72 hours. Day and night. Watching tv and in my sleep. Like ‘Station to Station’ and ‘Low,’ ‘Heroes’ is a cryptic product of a high order of intelligence. Committed to survival. ‘Heroes’ is the theme song for every great movie. Made remade or yet to come. We the living. We are the girl in a torn wedding dress escaping thru wire into the crown of a bullet. We are the soldier blowing kisses from the back of a train. We are drunk and raging and kneeling in/time in a dead hotel room. We are the heroes of Rimbaud's poem royalty. Two people mystically colliding. The boys of Koln cut out. The younger stayed longer. He had passion for MC5. He was going to quit school and play guitar all day. I was packing for America. He was telling me how it felt when he plugged in and connected with his weapon. He was saying a lot of stuff and I was thinking about heroes. Find them where they're sleeping. Know them where they lie. Deep in another system. Deep in the heart and motor of the most despised cities in the world.”

DAVID BOWIE: “In some ways, sadly, the Berlin albums really captured unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all know would never come to pass.”

TONY SALES: “[The Idiot tour] was two schoolboys hanging out, chums. It was a very loving relationship in a sense. David was at a place where he needed to recharge and got behind Iggy – and in return that helped him, taking the pressure off being David Bowie.”

KRIS NEEDS: “This is a guy who roughly a year before was supposed to be out of his mind on cocaine. And here he was in sensible shoes and a jacket, maybe a flat cap like Iggy’s, just open and chatting to everyone.”

HUNT SALES: “David really loved him as a friend. Giving something to someone is not giving something and expecting something in return. You just give it.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “In between rounds of interviews, David spent a quiet Christmas as the Hauptstrasse – Coco cooked goose for a cozy, celebratory get-together. It would be their last Christmas break in Berlin, and it caused a public spat with Angie, an outburst that effectively announced their marriage was over. The exchange kicked off with Angie complaining to the ‘Sunday Mirror’s’ Tony Robinson that her husband had ‘without my knowledge taken our son’ from the Vevey house over Christmas. ‘I really want David to suffer,’ she told Robinson. ‘Perhaps the only way he’ll suffer is if I do myself in.’ Soon after the interview, she attempted suicide by downing sleeping pills, then smashed all the glassware in the house before throwing herself down the stairs, breaking her nose. Early in her stay at the Samaritan hospital in Vevey, Angie created so much commotion that the woman in the neighboring bed, who’d been hospitalized after a cardiac arrest, suffered a relapse.”

ANONYMOUS: “Angie was just helpless – she had no one on her side. We’d say Die Felle schwimmen davon – your furs are swimming away. Everything is falling apart.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I kept wanting to leave the tour to keep off drugs. The drug use was unbelievable and I knew it was killing me, so that was the difficult side of it. But the playing was fun.”

ANGELA BOWIE: “Oh my dear! Berlin was like a honeymoon for David and Iggy. They were bon vivants – flashing money, buying a lot of crap, trying to imagine that they were living in the twenties or thirties like Christopher Isherwood. David and Iggy chose Berlin to hang out in because there’s more drag queens per square inch performing onstage than any other city in the world. David and Iggy’s was the friendship of the damned.”

DAVID BOWIE: “I had not intended to leave Berlin, I just drifted away. Maybe I was getting better. It was an irreplaceable, unmissable experience and probably the happiest time in my life up until that point. Coco, Jim and I had so many great times. But I just can’t express the feeling of freedom I felt there. Some days the three of us would jump into the car and drive like crazy through East Germany and head down to the Black Forest, stopping off at any small village that caught our eye. Just go for days at a time. Or we’d take long all afternoon lunches at the Wannsee on winter days. The place had a glass roof and was surrounded by trees and still exuded an atmosphere of the long gone Berlin of the twenties. At night we’d hang with the intellectuals and beats at the Exile restaurant in Kreutzberg. In the back they had this smoky room with a billiard table and it was sort of like another living room except the company was always changing… Then Elephant Man came up, which caused me to be in the US for a considerable spell. Then Berlin was… over.”