David Bowie - 'Station to Station' reissue

By the time punk rock was coming together, one of its progenitors, David Bowie, had already abandoned the loud, sloppy guitars and hedonistic lyrics that would become its trademarks. Sure, the genre was due to come about anyway, thanks to the work of the Stooges, MC5 and Patti Smith, among others, but the fact remains, by the time Ramones came out in April 1976, Bowie had shed his proto-punk/glam tendencies. This transition began on his ’75 tribute to Philly soul, Young Americans, but became complete with its follow-up, Station to Station, which recently received a deluxe re-release from EMI boosted by a live bootleg and, if you really want to spend some money, tons of alternate mixes, concert paraphernalia and glorious vinyl.

Originally released in Jan. 1976, Station to Station set about creating post-punk before there was even a punk. Granted, other artists like Kraftwerk and Brian Eno had already laid some of the groundwork, but Bowie’s late ’70s work was just as important. Taken in context with his subsequent “Berlin trilogy,” Station to Station is still pretty soulful. But compared to the legitimate R&B of Young Americans, it’s a downright insane album, a mere six tracks that take the electrified funk of “Fame” and turn it into some sort of alien dance music.

I should probably mention that Bowie did a shit-ton of cocaine around this period, which is how he was able to work in the studio for days on end before sleeping. And like any good coke record – Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4, Oasis’ Be Here Now – the songs are insanely long. The title track which opens the record is 10 minutes long, with a three-and-a-half-minute intro. And it opens with a train taking off for the first 73 seconds. This should be the most indulgent song of Bowie’s career, but instead its one of his best. The song slowly lurches to life, as Carlos Alomar’s guitar slinks in and wills it to life.

Can we talk about the drum sound David Bowie gets on his records? Because the stuff he scored in the late ’70s is ridiculously good. Eno nailed some fantastically metallic beats for Low, but producer Harry Maslin and drummer Dennis Davis get an amazingly nuanced sound on “Station to Station.” It’s a simple funk beat, drained of its heat and turned into a robotically precise jam. It’s for this reason alone that the title track rules, although it helps that Bowie bothered to craft a nice chorus, when he can remember to sing it.

Station to Station still has touches of Bowie’s old sound. The piano-driven “TVC15” has a pinch of Young Americans’ warmth, while “Stay” has the kind of guitar histrionics that would have worked on Diamond Dogs (and probably would have improved that album). But overall, Station is a new breed. It’s incredibly danceable and funky, but it’s blindingly alien and alienated. The lyrics deal with obsessing over technology. The music often pushes its histrionics into the stratosphere, reaching for something more spacey.

In the wrong hands, Station to Station could have been a prog-rock mess, the sort of instrumental masturbation that punk would reject. Instead, it proves that not all jammy ’70s records suck. The same can be said, intermittently, for “Live Nassau Coliseum ’76,” the live bootleg that accompanies the Station re-release. The two-disc set captures a taut set from Bowie, one which takes older glam rock tunes and repurposes them for this new sound.

Station to Station and “Fame” dominate the setlist, and they’re fittingly funky. Sometimes the songs get to be too much. Davis’ restraint on the record is commendable; his showboating live is deplorable, and he turns the title track into a self-indulgent mess live. “TVC15” still rips, though.

It’s the old songs that make this deluxe edition essential for Bowie fans, though. “Five Years” comes out a little perfunctory, but these tight post-punk versions of “Panic in Detroit” and “Changes” are nuts. Yeah, the solo section near the end of “Panic” ruins the fun, but up until then, it’s a completely new, excellent version of an already great song. This is Bowie in his prime, when any style he chose worked, and the crowd loves it. The banter between songs is pretty great too. I love how cocky Bowie gets when he introduces “Changes,” as if no one in attendance could have possibly heard of that particular song.

Young Americans and Station to Station are important transitional records for Bowie. He renounced his glam rock ways, dabbled in funk for a little while and then started exploring more economical post-punk songwriting with his seminal work, Low. The new Station re-release wonderfully captures Bowie just before that point, both live and in the studio.

Versus: 'Ziggy Stardust' v. 'Low'

[Versus pits two of an artist’s classic albums against each other even if they’re stylistically different, because that “you can’t compare apples and oranges” bullshit is for people without balls, spines, or all those other things that separate us from the villainous jellyfish.]

David Bowie is one of the greatest musicians of all time. Knock him all you want – he made plenty of crappy album, he stole from a lot of people – but he’s still awesome, and you’re still a dick. Dude wrote “Queen Bitch;” what have you done? At the same time, Bowie’s discography is admittedly not perfect. “Queen Bitch,” for example, comes from Hunky Dory, an album that boasts some pretty amazing songs (“Changes,” “Life on Mars?”, “Oh! You Pretty Things”) and some pretty crappy ones (“Andy Warhol,” “Fill Your Heart”). Most of his albums are worth owning; few are perfect.

There are two records in his vast discography that stand out as exceptional, though, and each one was a harbinger of sorts for Bowie’s many stylistic changes: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is, for many, the zenith of Bowie’s glam rock period, while Low is the pinnacle of his experiment/post-punk period and the best entry in his “Berlin Trilogy” for others. They were released five years apart, and they sound like they came from two very different creators. You can argue that Ziggy and Low weren’t entirely left field creations – flecks of flam rock show up The Man Who Sold the World, while Station to Station predicts the krautrock direction Bowie would fleetingly embrace – but both are the best starting points for exploring those respective points in the man’s career.

I’m a Bowie dork, so I think everything he did from 1969 (Space Oddity) to ’86 (um… the Labyrinth soundtrack) is worth owning, and I alternate my favorites constantly. Still, Ziggy and Low are two records that I’m constantly falling in love with over and over again. Ziggy strikes me as an album that isn’t straight glam rock, compared to T. Rex, but it’s all the better for it. There’s still a tinge of psychedelic jazz in the guitar work, like on the outro to “Moonage Daydream,” and a surprising amount of acoustic guitar considering how loud Mick Ronson got. There’s a little bit of glitter lingo spread around (“Let the children boogie!”), but the best images are apocalyptic. Ziggy sings about the world ending in five years, about aliens, about his got-damn band tearing apart. It’s all very sexy guitar rock. FACT: The chords to “Ziggy Stardust” are wicked awesome. Bowie tried to recreate this new rock sound for a while – Aladdin Sane succeeds, Diamond Dogs sinks, sinks, sinks – but he ultimately abandoned the sound by the time punk rock came around, which is funny since that new audience definitely would have loved the Spiders.

And let’s be honest: “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” is a darn good closing track, tapping into rock’s mythology about casualties so well that Bowie used to close every show with it.

Low isn’t quite the opposite of that, but it comes close. For his first collaboration with Brian Eno, Bowie piled on the synthesizers, although new best buddy Carlos Alomar certainly drops in some guitar, as does Ricky Gardiner. The instrument that stands out the most for me, though, is the drums. Producer Tony Visconti pulled some magic tricks to create a punchy, cavernous sound that has never been duplicated. I go back and forth over who got better drum sounds, Steve Albini on In Utero or Visconti on Low. Ziggy might rock more, but the drums on “Breaking Glass” hit so much harder.

Low is a more dynamic record, one that lends itself to different moods. There’s a chilly mood that lingers, but plenty of guitar licks that give it a sunnier vibe, like on the opening instrumental “Speed of Life.” Other standouts include the spastic rhythm of “What in the World” and the ominous build of “Always Crashing in the Same Car.” These opening tunes are all condensed, poppy, yet otherworldly. The flipside explores more ethereal territory, like the lengthy “Warszawa.” “Art Decade” is another solid, searching tune. “Weeping Wall” is deliciously weird.

Ziggy is the better gateway album to Bowie’s world, but Low is the better album overall (Better album cover too… way less mullet). It was more ahead of its time, then and now. Plenty of today’s indie bands can be connected back to Low; few have equaled its excellence. In a way, it also marks the slow, slow decline of Bowie. Not that he didn’t keep making good records (“Heroes”, The Lodger, and again the Labyrinth soundtrack all come to mind), but it’s the last perfect Bowie record.

Seriously, though, listen to those drums!

Marc Spitz - 'Bowie'

Folks, I’ve been on a big Bowie kick for the last month or so. It was revived thanks to Hugo Wilcken’s entry on Low for the 33 1/3 series, which got me listening to the “Berlin Trilogy” … and then Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and Lust for Life albums, which Bowie had a hand in around the same time … and then Aladdin Sane just ’cause I like that album. The next book I picked up, to my delight, was Marc Spitz’s Bowie, a biography/love letter to one David Robert Jones. Turns out he’s been on a Bowie kick too, only his has lasted since 1978 or so, when he heard “Space Oddity” for the first time at age nine. He writes:

I would look up at the sky and wonder what it would be like to be Major Tom, trapped way up there in outer space, floating in a tin can forever. Was it technically living? …Bowie made me consider existentialism before I even knew what it meant to be alive (and before I ever really thought about my death). It was much easier to reckon with the Grease soundtrack and put off the inevitable, but I already knew even then that Bowie’s music had permanently damaged me. [p. 24]

See, Spitz interweaves his own personal interaction with Bowie’s music (loves it, needs it) and the man himself (visits his favorite New York spots, sees him once on the street and then loses his nerve) into the narrative. It doesn’t overwhelm the story of the main subject’s life like, say, Jon Krakauer’s insistence on injecting his camping trips into the more interesting life and death of Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild. If anything, I would have been OK with more Spitz-bits, but then, I generally dig his writing (his work with Spin, and with Brendan Mullen for We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, are both essential music reading). The anecdotes remind us that Spitz is a fan, and that this book is a labor of love, although the writing style alone indicates that.

Spitz covers as much territory as he can without actually having to interview his idol. He gets most of the key players – ex-wife Angie Bowie, guitarist Carlos Alomar, a ton of former managers and more – to cover the story, and utilizes a deep bibliography to fill in the missing storytellers, like the late Mick Ronson and Bowie himself. The result is a bio that hits all the needed plot points – his birth, his troubled family history, “The Laughing Gnome,” “Space Oddity,” glam rock, Brian Eno, conquering the ’80s, fading into obscurity in the ’80s, Tin Machine and more.

Given his self-admitted fandom, Spitz occasionally runs the risk of gushing too much:

Ziggy [Stardust] is the space-race anticlimax, Manson and Altamont and Nixon’s reelection and the breakup of the Beatles made sexy. Rock ‘n’ roll ecdysis is a crucial element of his appeal. Ziggy says to all those in pain, “You have failed as human beings, but it’s all right. We will succeed as slinky, jiving space insects. Let all the children boogie!” [p. 178]

But here’s the thing. Spitz’s loving passages come from a place of deep-seated devotion. He’s not peddling bunk here. And he’s also not afraid to call his idol on his own bunk. Labyrinth gets a knock (Sounds like somebody needs a love injection). Some critically derided albums get elevated (Diamond Dogs, Let’s Dance), while others get dropped (Tonight, Never Let Me Down and even Space Oddity, which I happen to think is an underrated psych/folk/rock album). Sure, Spitz softballs Bowie’s sexual indiscretions and, uh, that time he got super coked out and spent the late ’70s advocating Nazism and fascism, but it’s not like he digs to justify every little thing he did. For comparison’s sake, check out Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life, in which the author spends an entire chapter not only validating his subject’s proclivity for masturbation, but elevating it to some sort of artistic expression on par with John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

Bowie hits a sweet spot of being informative, passionate and as honest as possible. Spitz even talked me into expanding my already pretty big Bowie collection (I’ve got Starting Point, a collection of Bowie’s early, kind of terrible, ’60s novelty singles, through the Labyrinth soundtrack from 1986. Dare I try on Earthling or Heathen?). The ending is somewhat lacking – Bowie is still alive after all – but given that his last studio album, Reality, came out in 2003, Spitz has as good a conclusion as he could hope for currently. Super fans should give it a gander, although it’s easy enough to follow that even novices looking for someone to guide them through Bowie’s dense discography might be interested in it as well. After all, if you like folk, punk, post-punk, R&B, glam rock, funk, industrial, goth, so-bad-it’s-good-rap (a la Labyrinth’s “Chilly Down”) or any of the fashions associated with those genres, Bowie might have a song or two to hook you in as well.

Vinyl Vednesday 11/18

[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick-measuring contest, but it kinda is. E-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]

Records: Alkaline Trio’s Goddamnit rerelease (2008) on grey marble with an alternate cover, David Bowie’s Space Oddity rerelease (1972) on black with an alternate cover, and Hüsker Dü’s Candy Apple Grey (1986) on black with, um, a normal cover?

Place of Purchase: Goddamnit was purchased at Hot Topic in Montgomeryville. Space Oddity was the first vinyl record I ever bought, at Legends in Plymouth Meeting (R.I.P.). Candy Apple Grey came from Hideaway Music in Chestnut Hill. They specialize in classic rock and jazz, so anytime they get an underground rock record, they price it to move, which is awesome for me. Also, everyone reading this knows I live in southeastern Pennsylvania, right?

Thoughts: I went a little bass ackwards when it came to experiencing Alkaline Trio. They didn’t hit my radar until From Here to Infirmary; didn’t bother checking them out until my roommate Eric made me buy Maybe I’ll Catch Fire in like 2005. The last Alk3 release I purchased was Goddamnit. Holy crap, I totally get why people love this album. These are some zesty tunes about drunken sexcapades (or lack thereof), I tell you what. “Clavicle” is such a sweet song. This is Chicago punk at its finest (Lawrence Arms notwithstanding). I’m kind of bummed the cover came in such questionable condition, but I’ll deal.

I was a decent-sized Bowie fan in high school, in that I loved Labyrinth and Changesbowie. After I got my first record player senior year, I decided to start exploring Bowie’s discography further. I figured I’d start with Space Oddity because, well, I liked “Space Oddity” a lot. Those hand claps are awesome. Time would reveal that it probably wasn’t the best starting point, but I think Space Oddity is still a pretty underrated Bowie record from his brief psych-folk period. Sometimes he gets a little too needlessly wordy, but jams like “Janine” and “God Knows I’m Good” are keepers. I think my favorite track, though, is the closer, “Memory of a Free Festival.” It’s a lengthy recounting of a festival Bowie attended. It’s pretty free love-y, but by the time the band hits the refrain – “The sun machine is comin’ down and we’re gonna have a party” – I don’t care. I have always wanted to cover this song.

Side note: I really miss Legends. It was a comics store in the Plymouth Meeting Mall that also sold games of the RPG and CCG variety, as well as records. The prices could be a little debatable at times, but the quality was always good. And they sold indie comics! It brings me to tears (TEARS!) that small suburbanite children aren’t reading Hate or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

Hüsker Dü is a band I got into pretty much because every music critic ever told me to. Sometimes those folks are right. My introduction to the band came via Zen Arcade, but I’ve always found Candy Apple Grey to be more palatable. That’s probably because it was the band’s major label debut. Where Zen was all about being sonically punishing, Candy combined melancholy lyrics with catchy hooks, as illustrated by the single “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely.” I get a bit of an Elvis Costello vibe, especially on tracks like “Dead Set on Destruction” and “Sorry Somehow.” This record is perfect from start to finish, although I do often find myself skipping to “Hardly Getting Over It” quite a bit. Saddest song to sing to yourself while drunk? Ebyam.