So Low, How Low?

After the cocaine-fuelled recording of 1976’s Station To Station, David Bowie reached his breaking point. In a bid to get clean, he fled to Europe with good friend (and fellow addict) Iggy Pop in order to record the latter’s 1977 album The Idiot. What happened next is the stuff of rock folklore. Teaming up with producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, Bowie recorded much of his critically acclaimed and groundbreaking Berlin Trilogy at Hansa Studios in West Berlin. Influenced by krautrock and Eno’s ambient music, the Berlin Trilogy would become one of the most influential and enigmatic of Bowie’s career phases.

Most people know Bowie from his glam-rock era with the 1971 release Hunky Dory and the 1972 release The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Some know him from his Thin White Duke era with the aforementioned 1976 release of Station To Station. But very few seem to remember the Bowie of 1977-1979 and his classic run of Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger. Let's take a deeper look at these records to discern why they have had such an enduring influence on post-punk, electronic music, and synth-pop among other genres.

Because Low and “Heroes” were divided into two sides each, the first incorporating traditional rock structures and themes and the second seeing Bowie delve into experimental and ambient sounds, we can roughly divide these albums into four parts. Of these four parts, undoubtedly my favorite is the first side of Low which features the soaring “Sound and Vision,” maudlin “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” and desperate “Be My Wife.” In the last of these tracks, Bowie pleads with Angela Bowie, his first wife, singing: “Sometimes you get so lonely / Sometimes you get nowhere / I've lived all over the world / I've left every place / Please be mine / Share my life / Stay with me / Be my wife.” With concision and clarity, Bowie distills the trials and tribulations of his marriage which would ultimately end only a few years later in 1980.

“Heroes” and Lodger are more spotty releases but still bear mentioning considering their enduring acclaim and influence. Although the title track of “Heroes” is perhaps his most well-known song, Bowie is at his best on Lodger’s opening track “Fantastic Voyage” where he sings: “We're learning to live with somebody's depression / And I don't want to live with somebody's depression / We'll get by, I suppose / It's a very modern world, but nobody's perfect.” Struggling with the same demons of depression and loneliness which plagued him on Low, “Fantastic Voyage” offers insight into Bowie’s fragile mental state at this point in his life shortly before his divorce. The Berlin Trilogy is a chronicle of a drug-addled rockstar’s return from the depths of human experience to the heights of creative expression. It’s most certainly worth a listen.

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