“I rammed him for a good five to ten minutes,” Bowie later recalled, between songs at a BBC concert in 2000. “Nobody stopped. Nobody did anything.”
At a time of such incredible personal turmoil, he was able not just to continue working, but to create some of the most striking, moving, and groundbreaking work
The cover of the live album he released in October 1974, David Live, shows the full extent of his physical deterioration.
This kind of paranoid, drug-fueled rambling would become typical of David Bowie interviews over the next 18 months.
about watching for UFOs (“I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year”), Mayan civilization, media control and “cultural manipulation”, and Nazism,
It was the first of his albums to abandon, almost entirely, rock ’n’ roll in favour of something funkier and more soulful.
Angela Bowie notes that she “never saw any jugs, jars, vials, or any other containers full of urine
He also read avidly, as ever, having apparently brought 400 books with him for the 11-week shoot.
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. Alomar would then figure out several arrangements of each song with Dennis Davis and George Murray, from which Bowie would pick the one he liked best.
Dennis Davis’s drumming might be metronomic, but is keenly felt, while Murray’s bass is responsive rather than restrictive.
But then Bowie always had, and still has, an almost childlike enthusiasm for thrusting his latest discoveries on anyone
Bowie’s interest in fascism is symptomatic of the very aspect of his character that is most often praised: his near-constant desire to grow and change
As bandleader Carlos Alomar put it some years later, “He’s a pseudo-intellectual. He is what he reads, and at that time in his life, he was reading so much bullshit.”
The point of his return to Europe, as he had decided six months earlier, was “to experiment; to discover new forms of writing; to evolve, in fact, a new musical language.”
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