David Bowie has always been the original chameleon or rock/pop. From his early days as a teenage mime performer and early conceptual artist, he when through a number of pop personas, Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane until in 1975 he became the ‘Thin White Duke’ and in 1976 adopting this persona ‘Station to Station’ was released. It is thought by many to be his best album to date.
This was an intensely productive period for Bowie in the same year as making this record he had also starred in Nicholas Roeg's critically acclaimed cult classic ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, playing a stranded alien. Possibly due to his affection for cocaine over recent years, which had begun to affect all aspects of his life, Bowie had lost weight and always appeared in public looking very pale, an almost cadaverous like figure. He tended to spout high-speed gibberish at interviews outlining his views on drugs, fascism and the occult. With this album he announced that his glam rock days were over and he entered a much darker introspective period of his career.
*THE ALBUM*
Track listing:1.Station To Station (10:08) 2.Golden Years (4:03) 3.Word On A Wing (6:00) 4.TVC15 (5:29) 5.Stay (6:08) 6.Wild Is The Wind (5:58)
7.Word On A Wing (6:10)
8.Stay (7:24)
*Bonus tracks on CD release
‘Station to Station’ is quite different from Bowie’s previous work. The exuberance of the glam era had given way to a new colder, mechanistic sound. Gone were the black American influences as he started to embrace an earlier 20’ and 30’s German cabaretesque (made up word!) attitude liberally mixed with a European futuristic sound. In this record we can clearly hear the influences, which would lead him to the later Berlin period and his collaborations with Kaftwerk and Brian Eno.
Originally Bowie had planned to release a soundtrack album for ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ but as that project fell through he put together some songs he had been writing during the making of the film to produce ‘Station To Station’.
Bowie didn’t want to tie himself down to making a record with a clearly distinguishable sound, with this in mind he gathered musician from New York including guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick and pianist Roy Brittan (from Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band). Bowie presented the music to Alomar and the rest of the musicians and allowed them to approach the songs in a variety of styles from which Bowie would choose the final version. Only then would he add the lyrics often written in fast amphetamine induced frenzy. This was a time of great excesses for Bowie both in work and in his private life.
Despite the drugs or because of the drugs the record started taking shape.
The first track on the album is the title track ‘Station To Station’, as you might guess this recalls a train journey a subject close to Bowie heart since he suffered a fear of flying and trains were his favourite form of transport. The song is a ten minute representation of a three day train journey from New York to Los Angeles. It starts with some playful stereo train sound effects but gradually builds up and ends in high-speed cocaine fuelled frenzy.
One of the most interesting tracks is ‘Golden Years’ a slow, funk inspired laconic ballad that Bowie had apparently written with Elvis in mind. Golden Years surprisingly was the albums only hit single.
From drugs Bowie moves neatly to God not always such a huge leap in his own mind. In ‘Word On A Wing’ which features angelic choirs he examines the idea of searching for spirituality and God, this ties in with his habit around this time of wearing a crucifix round his neck. This track and the final track Wild Is the Wind finds Bowie adopting a crooning style for his delivery of the lyrics. Interestingly enough ‘Wild is the Wind’ was originally featured in a George Cukor 1957 western of the same name starring Anthony Quinn. The 50’s were a golden period for crooners so Bowie’s delivery is not historically out of place.
The strangest song on what is a strange record is TV15. The song tells us how a television set eats a girl and is based on a story that Bowie’s good friend at the time Iggy Pop told him. After a night’s drug taking Iggy Pop imagined his TV opening up and swallowing his girlfriend. The song is a fragmented, raunchy number with brilliant guitar by Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick and a funk fuelled piano playing by Roy Brittan. This track was also released as a single but surprisingly bombed in the charts.
On the accompanying tour to promote the album Bowie finally presented his new image to his fans. Wearing a black waistcoat and white shirt he looked like the antithesis of his previous Glam Rock personas, even his performance on stage was restrained to emphasise the point. The record also courted controversy when Bowie was seen giving the Nazi salute on arriving at on e of the venues on the English part of the tour. Bowie later recalled that for this whole period he had been
“Out of my mind completely crazed”.
In terms of Bowie’s career ‘Station To Station’ was a masterstroke. With this album he had disengaged himself from his previous rock persona thus avoiding the coming backlash of punk. In 1976 this new Bowie style was odd enough to still be considered hip by fans and was largely ignored by non-fans. It was strange enough for most music critics to be rather non-committal as music critics tend to be when faced with things they’re not sure about, just in case it turns out to be a classic a few years down the line and they end up with rather large omelettes on their faces. In this case they would have been right since ‘Station to Station’ could be said to have had a hand in creating the techno pop and New Romantic styles of the early 80’s and is now considered a classic of that period. It is very much a transitional work on the road to his collaboration with Iggy Pop on ‘The Idiot’ and later work on ‘Low’ in Berlin. A period, which also saw Bowie give up his excessive use of drugs allowing him to once again become a main stream performer in the 80’s.
‘Station to Station’ is an important album although this can be seen better in retrospect than at the time. It influenced many musical styles to follow and still sounds fresh and current today, which is more than can be said for most of the other music of this period.
His best album? Not quite, I think Ziggy Stardustis better but this is certainly among his best and can be regarded as one of the most influential album of the 70's.
An eerie dispatch from the furthest reaches of Bowie's cocaine paranoia, Station To ... more
Station has not become easier to listen to with the passing years. At this stage, Bowie was wrapped up in his peculiar--even by his standards--Thin White Duke period, w...
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Apr 23rd, 2002
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