Bowie in America

Cracked Actor – Time in America

If there were any quotes that sum up David Bowies time in America, it would be an answer he gave in an interview that appeared in the documentary, Cracked Actor. Bowie “compares himself and his experiences in America to “a fly floating around in my milk…it is a foreign body and it’s getting a lot of milk. That’s kind of how I felt – a foreign body, and I couldn’t help but soak it all up.” (Seabrook 32).

Watch full documentary here:

While Bowie was in America, he took up residency in Los Angeles California (April of 1975), which only fueled his ongoing addiction to cocaine and eroded his physical and mental health (Seabrook 34). In addition to his use of cocaine, “he had taken to not sleeping for as many as six days at a time, and was existing on a diet of milk and green and red peppers, which had caused him to become painfully thin” (Seabrook 34).

The Man Who Fell To Earth

Also during this period, Bowie stared in the science fiction film The Man Who Fell To Earth, in which he played the main character Thomas Jerome Newton. This character provided Bowie with a new persona to take on. Bowie adopted the “striking dyed red, center-parted hairdo” (Seabrook 44). The adopted parts of Newton’s character became Bowie’s new onstage character – The Thin White Duke (Seabrook 44).

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Under The Influence of…Germans

Before Bowie left America and relocated in Berlin, it is clear to see that aspects of Bowie’s work was influenced by German art and ideas. Here is a list of references that Bowie made to German art and ideas before he started working in Berlin:

1. Bowie was occupying his mind (when he wasn’t going through extreme paranoia) with subjects such as “occultism” and “Nietzschean protofascism,” which were believed to be “his two main areas of interest in 1975” (Seabrook 36).
2. Before the Station To Station tour, Bowie toured to support his album Diamond Dogs. For this tour, he had a backdrop constructed based off of Robert Wiene’s 1919 classic of German expressionist cinema, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. (61)
3.  On the Station To Station tour, instead of an opening act, the audience was treated to a screening of the 1922 art film Un Chien Andalou, that was backed by Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album (Seabrook 61).
4. Analysis of the song ‘Station To Station’:“The song’s relentless rhythm has often been likened to the ‘motorik’ sound of the leading German groups of the time, of which Kraftwerk were the frontrunners, and which was an undoubted influence on Bowies latest stylistic shift” (Seabrook 51).After creating Station To Station, Bowie began work on creating the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell To Earth. The music for this soundtrack was influenced by Kraftwerks Autobahn and Radioactivity (54). The music was never used for the film’s soundtrack, but some of the material influenced the first album of the ‘Berlin Triptych,’ Low (56).

Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity

 

The Release of Station to Station

Station To Station established the working method that Bowie would employ on all three of his ‘Berlin’ albums, as well as other subsequent releases. He would arrive at the studio with little more than a couple of song fragments – in this case ‘Word On A Wing’ and ‘Golden Years’ – which he then handed over to bandleader carlos Alomar (Seabrook 47). Alomar would then figure out several arrangements of each song with Dennis Davis and Geoge Murray, from which Bowie would pick the one he liked best. These Rhythm parts would be recorded quickly, while the ideas were still fresh and exciting to the players, before Bowie oversaw the more the more laborious process of overdubbing. This was the first album to be recorded on 24-track (Seabrook 47).

The title-track Station to Station:

 

Bowie decides to leave America for Berlin

Taking the advice of his manager’s friend, Bowie considered moving to Switzerland on the grounds that he could avoid heavy taxes. His wife, Angela also had connections in Switzerland because she attended boarding school there. Angela also thought that this would help Bowie’s addiction to cocaine and calm his paranoia (60).

Famous writer Christopher Isherwood attended the February 11th Los Angeles show of this tour and met Bowie. It was Isherwood who convinced Bowie to move to Berlin (64).

When asked why he felt the need to return to Europe by Melody Maker’s Allen Jones, Bowie replied with, “Toward the end of my stay in America, I realized that what I had to do was experiment. To discover new forms of writing. To evolve, in fact a new musical language. That is what I set out to do. That’s why I returned to Europe” (52).