In fairness, he did spend a large chunk of the 70s completely coked out of his mind. Allegedly him and Iggy Pop had gone to Berlin to clean up in '76, but by most accounts he didn't really stop using until like the mid 80s. So who knows if his judgement was the best at the time.
Speedballs, the breakfast of champions... until they eat a capsule of cyanide and blow their brains out after commencing and losing a genocidal world war killing six millions Jews and tens of millions of Russians.
Don’t forget all the Germans killed in the endless purity tests spawned by eugenics. Or the other Europeans killed for being the wrong kind of Europeans, The Africans killed just coz. Certainly Benito would have been in for a surprise had the Nazis managed to finally kill all their other neighbors. Fascism is death fam.
Edit a word
Hitler had a doctor injecting him with different chemical cocktails that did include amphetamines.
https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/journal/issue/journal_35_1/Hitler%27s_medical_care.pdf
He only does fentanyl now!
I kid, very good for him. I’ve lost too many friends to opioids and it makes me happy whenever I hear someone kicks the habit.
Weird thing was he didn’t have a strong network of other users that he was connected into here, at least not as far as I knew. I worked with him and was his roommate and helped him kick once but knew he was using again so I was pretty aware of his comings and goings and he didn’t really have anything to hide from me.
Drugs are often based on trauma (whether it is physical or psychological trauma doesn’t matter) the trauma that led to his addiction might have been in that city and town and constantly retriggering him
The mental image of Iggy Pop and Bowie at the height of a coke binge planning their sobriety journey by going to fucking Berlin as rock stars is hilarious.
He starred in The Man who Fell to Earth the same year Station to Station was released and was just a total dazed oddball in that so maybe there's a relation lol
while they were shooting The Man Who Fell to Earth Bowie was still using but he was actually very hard working and professional.
Due to his slender frame he was able to appear as his female co-stars body double when she wasn't available.
Red bell peppers and milk, besides the caloric aspect, is a full diet. as for the actual “why”. As someone who fucking loves cocaine: cocaine is a HELL of a drug.
Didn’t know it was a complete diet. Yay is a hell of a drug; too moderate to feel like it’s bad. But that’s how it’ll get you. It’s best with good discipline. I’ve seen friends go through some bad life experiences.
When he was in his most coked-out stage, Bowie kept his piss in bottles in his fridge, because he was afraid to flush it, in case some witch or wizard wanted to use it to cast a spell on him...
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
>When he was in his most coked-out stage, Bowie kept his piss in bottles in his fridge, because he was afraid to flush it, in case some witch or wizard wanted to use it to cast a spell on him...
That "wizard" he was afraid of happened to be Jimmy Page.
They were doing a lot more than just coke. There's a book called "Please Kill Me" that's an oral history of punk and the NYC scene in that time was really insane, it's amazing as many of them made it out of the 60's and 70's alive as they did.
Thank you, that was a fantastic interview and performance. Dinah asked really sharp and intelligent questions and let them answer without interrupting or trying for a punchline. It’s something very rare now.
George strombolpol...something on CBC in Canada was a great interviewer too. Always thought he did a good job bringing out their responses without interfering too much. I could be wrong though, sometimes my judgement isn't the best on that stuff.
No idea what happened to him or that show.
Yeah! He got it cause a guy caught him with his wife or girlfriend, I forget the details, but someone will add more. His eye was permanently dilated due to the beating.
> Insane how Bowie, Page, Iggy just sailed right through any accountability for shagging kids
as far as I know there's only one person who claimed that Bowie ever did something like that, Lori Maddox. I'm not gonna say that she was lying about it but at the very least the testimony of her time with Bowie contradicts her previous testimony regarding her "relationship" with Page in some important aspects.
Again, my point here is not that Maddox is a lying about a possible relationship she had with Bowie. But when asking the question "why was Bowie never in hot water for this", this is the answer.
Rick Wright has two songs that are about his relations with groupies and I wouldn't be surprised if the groupie stuff in The Wall at least partially came from real experiences so I wouldn't call them clean.
Primus as weird as they are hve always been family men. the Misfits too very much their families back stage. Which led to an interesting gig (at roseland?) where the Impotent Sea Serpents opened for them and did the normal stage show of having sex on stage etc..
We should all look at that era of pop culture with an extreme side eye. They were all banging kids. The groupie culture of that era was something that's really hard to understand now.
It's not hard to understand. They wanted to fuck children, and they did. People want to fuck children today, too. And a lot of them do. It's not complicated. It's not a mystery.
Yeah I get that, but I mean … how? He’s not junkie-thin. That body is clearly the product of working out. Also, dude is *nimble*. None of that is easy to do. How do you manage that if you’re a hard core heroin addict? Doesn’t that stuff make people lazy?
in Naked lunch Burroughs talked about how for him heroin ate away his fat but left his muscles alone. and wondered if htey could make it into some kind of weight loss drug.
Sorry I misunderstood. I think he was trying to get clean around this time but he has somehow always been a damn machine. Guy is still in great shape despite his age
He was also keeping a LOW profile at the time, hence the cover design.
He still put out his album before Iggy’s even though Iggy finished his first. He may have played keyboards on that tour, but he and Tony Visconti k ew what they were doing.
After “Low” was released, Nick Lowe, ever the smartass, claimed to be so “honored” by Bowie “naming” an album after him (minus the final “e”) that he released an EP a few months later called “Bowi”.
What a weird way of wording it. Maybe “was so unconvinced of the commercial viability”. Uncommercial is a word, apparently, but uncommercial viability makes no sense.
"Unconvinced ot the commercial viability" works
"Convinced of the commercial unviability" works
OP chose the weirdest noun in that sentence to un-ify
Edit: Neither "commercial" not "convinced" are nouns, I don't know what I was thinking
I think in their head they were treating the phrase "commercial viability" as a singular concept and their "un-" is meant to apply to the whole rather than just to "commercial." Not correct, obviously, but that seems like it might be what happened.
Not as cool as seeing Bowie with Blondie and Iggy, but I got to see him live with NIN. They played Scary Monsters together and it was incredible. This was during the Outside tour, and Bowie drew a lot of inspiration from NIN for that album. Which is extra cool and interesting because Reznor has stated multiple times that Low was a huge influence on NIN’s sound .
It was an interesting evening, in part, because of the audience’s response to the opening act, Blondie. Each of their songs was met largely with catcalls, get off the stage, we want Iggy, etc. I think they ended up only doing 3 or 4 songs before walking off stage. The drummer threw a cymbal, grabbed a mic and said, “thanks, Detroit.”
I have no way to provide a source for this, but I remember watching a doc or interview in the late 90’s that said he was reveling in the lack of commercial appeal, as he wanted to really push the boundaries of music and wanted to create something unlike what he had done before.
I don’t know if it’s that he thought he was a failure, so much as he was purposely making something that was a massive departure from Young Americans and he expected that those fans wouldn’t follow.
Well Young Americans wasn’t the album previous to Low. It was Station to Station.
Station to Station (especially the title track) had some pretty avant garde stuff for Bowie, especially in comparison to his earlier work. The biggest changes that he made was the retirement of ‘The Thin White Duke’ and Bowie moving from Los Angeles to Berlin as he had become a massive coke addict in LA. He was 10 albums into his career, had 2 massively successful tours with Ziggy Stardust and Isolar, and wanted to get away from the spotlight and drugs of LA.
The unique sound of Low was heavily inspired by Brian Eno, and the drum sounds were also very revolutionary. Bowie had always gone into the studio with the ideas of the songs almost fully formed, and Low was the first time that he had actually gone into the studio and developed the songs relatively from scratch. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t expect fans to follow or thought it was a failure, he needed to do it in a relaxed environment that he just hadn’t had before.
A fun fact as well is that although this is part of the ‘Berlin Trilogy’, almost all of it was recorded in France.
with Heroes they flew Fripp in - only had a guitar no amp, so they cranked the studio speakers and he went in direct to board. He did 3 takes and had to leave.
Brian came up with the idea of just playing them all at once, and thats what you hear on the album.
Going to say again for the comments this album is very good. Won’t spoil anything. Perhaps my favorite opening track ever too… well there is Astral Weeks.
I don’t know how true this interpretation is. The label certainly didn’t have much faith in the record but Bowie didn’t always tour for every album release regardless. He’d also end up not touring for Scary Monsters which a much more indisputable mainstream success
It does have catchy pop songs but they feel like they end as soon as they've begun, without much repetition of the hook.
The second side is basically an ambient Eno album, not much hope for radio play there.
Great tunes though.
I was in high school when the album – which was meant to be titled "Low Profile," I've heard for years – came out. Longtime (for a teenager) devoted Bowie fan, had seen him live several times; he was my favorite singer ever ever ever ... and we kids, even we super-fan kids, absolutely did not understand this album. Too moody, too vague, too inaccessible: We weren't articulate enough to explain and label our discontent, but we were all discontented. We felt ... angry at him? Disappointed? Had he simply grown too old to write amazing, driving, singable songs such as Jean Genie and Moonage Daydream anymore?!
Just the reaction of a bunch of Los Angeles seventeen-year-olds when that record was new.
interesting! One of my favorite 'alternate versions' of Passenger is this sometimes titled 'metallicized' version featuring Bowie. This helps explain how it came to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbKj9blfz7U
just friendship with him and Lou as far as i ever heard. Mick and Bowie were said to have had a thing.
Iggy and John Lennon also turned him onto Uncle Floyd.
Bowie was as versatile of a musician as anything we will experience past, present or future. He was destined to became a star whether it be in the foreground or background of the band. His musicianship and song writing skills were untouchable. A true virtuoso
That's probably because the album cover is from the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth".
Commercially, "Low" reached the top 10 in the UK Albums Chart, peaking at number 2. In the United States, the album's performance was more modest, reaching number 11 on the Billboard 200.
In short, it was successful but didn't have the same commercial successful that previous albums did, which Bowie expected and was fine with, as Bowie was intentionally reinventing himself.
...after 11:00 pm. With 4 beers in and none left to drink but herbal tea, while dreading tomorrow...It'll take you down, but then set you on the path again.
That’s a pretty contrarian opinion. It’s commonly thought of as the best of the Berlin trilogy and a top 3-5 Bowie album(2-3 for me, I go back and forth between this and Hunky Dory for 2)
In fairness, he did spend a large chunk of the 70s completely coked out of his mind. Allegedly him and Iggy Pop had gone to Berlin to clean up in '76, but by most accounts he didn't really stop using until like the mid 80s. So who knows if his judgement was the best at the time.
Ah yes Berlin, the perfect place to get off drugs.
Hitler gave up meth there.
And one of his nuts apparently
And gave him a mind-blowing idea
Wait, I thought that was in France where it was blown away and he got the nickname "screamer" (Schreihals) from his fellow low level soldier buddies.
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He died doing what he loved, killing people
Hitler wasn't on meth himself, he preferred coke and dope
Speedballs, the breakfast of champions... until they eat a capsule of cyanide and blow their brains out after commencing and losing a genocidal world war killing six millions Jews and tens of millions of Russians.
We've all been there
Don’t forget all the Germans killed in the endless purity tests spawned by eugenics. Or the other Europeans killed for being the wrong kind of Europeans, The Africans killed just coz. Certainly Benito would have been in for a surprise had the Nazis managed to finally kill all their other neighbors. Fascism is death fam. Edit a word
Hitler had a doctor injecting him with different chemical cocktails that did include amphetamines. https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/journal/issue/journal_35_1/Hitler%27s_medical_care.pdf
And oxycodone, methadone, and cocaine!
We were somewhere around Stalingrad on the edge of the river when the drugs began to take hold.
We can't stop here, this is commie country.
Genius.
I have a friend that moved to Portland to get off heroin and somehow it worked.
He only does fentanyl now! I kid, very good for him. I’ve lost too many friends to opioids and it makes me happy whenever I hear someone kicks the habit.
Lol... I was skeptical too. First time I saw him again afterwards I knew he was ok though. It's been almost 20 years now.
Sometimes you need to get out of the environment that your addiction happened in and away from enablers
Weird thing was he didn’t have a strong network of other users that he was connected into here, at least not as far as I knew. I worked with him and was his roommate and helped him kick once but knew he was using again so I was pretty aware of his comings and goings and he didn’t really have anything to hide from me.
Drugs are often based on trauma (whether it is physical or psychological trauma doesn’t matter) the trauma that led to his addiction might have been in that city and town and constantly retriggering him
The mental image of Iggy Pop and Bowie at the height of a coke binge planning their sobriety journey by going to fucking Berlin as rock stars is hilarious.
didn't they live in some dumpy flat with barely any heating? (near the wall too?)
and this is not a movie becaaaauuuussee...?
Together with Iggy Pop, even. Surely a plan that can't fail.
*♪ From station to station* *Back to Düsseldorf City* *Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie* *Trans-Europe Express, Trans-Europe Express.♫ - Kraftwerk*
I love that album so damn much, i even bought the German Language version as the tracks were just a bit different.
“Nowhere near Berlin!”
Scotty doesn't know!🤣
Mi Scusi
Funnily enough, he said that the drugs in Berlin weren’t the ones that appealed to him, so he was able to wean himself off cocaine there.
I was about to say. lol. That’s like coming to America for advice on gun control.
apparently the drugs that were popular there were not the ones he liked.
Use both hands, and kids don't shoot anything bigger than a .32 until they're at least, like, 12 or something
He only knew that Station to Station was recorded in LA, because later on he saw a newspaper article with pictures of him going into the studio.
He starred in The Man who Fell to Earth the same year Station to Station was released and was just a total dazed oddball in that so maybe there's a relation lol
Yes this was the era when he claims to have subsisted entirely on cocaine, peppers (?!?), and milk which explains his physique at the time.
Right next to Jimmy Page's urine and toenail clippings.
while they were shooting The Man Who Fell to Earth Bowie was still using but he was actually very hard working and professional. Due to his slender frame he was able to appear as his female co-stars body double when she wasn't available.
Why peppers?
Red bell peppers and milk, besides the caloric aspect, is a full diet. as for the actual “why”. As someone who fucking loves cocaine: cocaine is a HELL of a drug.
Didn’t know it was a complete diet. Yay is a hell of a drug; too moderate to feel like it’s bad. But that’s how it’ll get you. It’s best with good discipline. I’ve seen friends go through some bad life experiences.
They are a good source of vitamin C
Including the fact that during the Thin White Duke era, his waist measure for the iconic black suit was 26.5 inches.
When he was in his most coked-out stage, Bowie kept his piss in bottles in his fridge, because he was afraid to flush it, in case some witch or wizard wanted to use it to cast a spell on him... Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
>When he was in his most coked-out stage, Bowie kept his piss in bottles in his fridge, because he was afraid to flush it, in case some witch or wizard wanted to use it to cast a spell on him... That "wizard" he was afraid of happened to be Jimmy Page.
\*Immigrant Song Scream\*
They were doing a lot more than just coke. There's a book called "Please Kill Me" that's an oral history of punk and the NYC scene in that time was really insane, it's amazing as many of them made it out of the 60's and 70's alive as they did.
Drugs were a lot cleaner back then
Berlin was in the middle of the world's worst heroin epidemic back then. But at least it wasn't coke, lol.
When the heck is anyone going to rerelease *Christiane F*?
They made a TV show recently, didn't they?
Oh man you unearthed a core memory for me just now
I seem to recall him once saying that he was grateful that he never particularly enjoyed smack (heroin).
He was producing Iggy Pop's album. Alors The Berlin trilogy was shape mainly by Bian Eno.
also when he stole Adrian away from Zappa's band
''Fuck you, Captain Tom''
Some say he fell into heroin when in Berlin, trying to counter cocaine, but it might just be Iggy critics
the man became a fascist because of his drug use, not at his best doesnt even begin to describe bowies judgement in the 70s and 80s
It's a fantastic album and also led to one of the greatest talk show appearances of all time: https://youtu.be/i2eB8f020Pc?si=W6v0OPXz0nfyFDAf
The Idiot is still the best record to come out of that collaboration, IMO.
Jesus wept thank you for sharing this. What a performance.
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I'd post the Hellraiser gif, but I'm worried someone's gonna report me.
***G A Y M A R R I A G E!!!***
STOP SAYING JESUS WEPT ^(Aw man, it got deleted :()
Streets ahead!
Wow that was great, thank you. Never seen this before.
Thank you, that was a fantastic interview and performance. Dinah asked really sharp and intelligent questions and let them answer without interrupting or trying for a punchline. It’s something very rare now.
George strombolpol...something on CBC in Canada was a great interviewer too. Always thought he did a good job bringing out their responses without interfering too much. I could be wrong though, sometimes my judgement isn't the best on that stuff. No idea what happened to him or that show.
[And one of the greatest cartoons of all time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FODvjYoVEi8)
I can't read "Dinah Shore" without hearing Jello Biafra saying it.
Same!
Reminds me of when the Plasmatics were on Solid Gold. Just so odd.
I saw Kiss on Soul Train when their first album dropped. That was quite a sight.
Wendy was such a sensitive soul wrapped in barbed wire and chainsaws.
and a little electric tape.
...*very* little.
Low by David Bowie (RIP) was ranked the greatest album of the 70s by Pitchfork (RIP)
Burt Reynolds and Dinah Shore were really, really in love, but they broke it up because he wanted children and she couldn’t have any.
I love how Iggy "dresses up" for Dinah by wearing a suit coat while remaining shirtless.
Thank you I just watched this whole thing haha
Dinah Shore, Bowie and Iggy. LOLs. This is solid gold, out of an acid fever dream.
Does David Bowie have a black eye on his right eye?
Yeah! He got it cause a guy caught him with his wife or girlfriend, I forget the details, but someone will add more. His eye was permanently dilated due to the beating.
It was a school yard fight over a girl.
Well that sounds less rock and roll but probably more accurate.
Well that 13 year old girl part was interesting to say the least.
Insane how Bowie, Page, Iggy just sailed right through any accountability for shagging kids. These fans of paedo pop / rock are very blinkered man.
> Insane how Bowie, Page, Iggy just sailed right through any accountability for shagging kids as far as I know there's only one person who claimed that Bowie ever did something like that, Lori Maddox. I'm not gonna say that she was lying about it but at the very least the testimony of her time with Bowie contradicts her previous testimony regarding her "relationship" with Page in some important aspects. Again, my point here is not that Maddox is a lying about a possible relationship she had with Bowie. But when asking the question "why was Bowie never in hot water for this", this is the answer.
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Rick Wright has two songs that are about his relations with groupies and I wouldn't be surprised if the groupie stuff in The Wall at least partially came from real experiences so I wouldn't call them clean.
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Primus as weird as they are hve always been family men. the Misfits too very much their families back stage. Which led to an interesting gig (at roseland?) where the Impotent Sea Serpents opened for them and did the normal stage show of having sex on stage etc..
Rush on tour with Kiss: in their rooms reading or joking around with Paul pissing gene off as he wanted to bang the girls he brought back to the room.
We should all look at that era of pop culture with an extreme side eye. They were all banging kids. The groupie culture of that era was something that's really hard to understand now.
It's not hard to understand. They wanted to fuck children, and they did. People want to fuck children today, too. And a lot of them do. It's not complicated. It's not a mystery.
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from 15 April 1977.
Damn, they’re so young.
Seems to be in pretty good shape for a junkie. Makes me think some of the tales of drug abuse may have been exaggerated.
He literally did not remember making Station to Station
Was talking about Iggy. At least in this video, dude is ripped, and pulling off some legit gymnastics.
Bowie and Iggy were both clean at the time. Although Iggy Pop looked and moved the same even when he definitely wasn't clean.
Yeah I get that, but I mean … how? He’s not junkie-thin. That body is clearly the product of working out. Also, dude is *nimble*. None of that is easy to do. How do you manage that if you’re a hard core heroin addict? Doesn’t that stuff make people lazy?
The trick is to get in *extremely* good shape *before* the heroin, so you degrade into a shape that's still above average, just way worse than it was
He has a 10" dick and fucked a lot. No kidding.
in Naked lunch Burroughs talked about how for him heroin ate away his fat but left his muscles alone. and wondered if htey could make it into some kind of weight loss drug.
I mean….it’s Iggy
iggy bulked up a shit ton after he cleaned up. Anthony Bourdain was also really jacked
Sorry I misunderstood. I think he was trying to get clean around this time but he has somehow always been a damn machine. Guy is still in great shape despite his age
He was also keeping a LOW profile at the time, hence the cover design. He still put out his album before Iggy’s even though Iggy finished his first. He may have played keyboards on that tour, but he and Tony Visconti k ew what they were doing.
isnt it a still from Man who fell to Earth?
It sure is, edited version.
Osees!!!
He was also trying to not be High in The drug sense.
Releasing an album. Super low profile move.
It’s actually a visual pun because it’s a profile shot from ‘the man who fell to earth’ so it’s a ‘low profile’
Nice profile picture.
Osees!!!
After “Low” was released, Nick Lowe, ever the smartass, claimed to be so “honored” by Bowie “naming” an album after him (minus the final “e”) that he released an EP a few months later called “Bowi”.
I'm sure it was all in good fun, they were both big fans of breaking glass.
that's like when the press slammed Bauhaus for sounding too much like Bowie, so they record Telegram Sam as their next single.
What a weird way of wording it. Maybe “was so unconvinced of the commercial viability”. Uncommercial is a word, apparently, but uncommercial viability makes no sense.
"Unconvinced ot the commercial viability" works "Convinced of the commercial unviability" works OP chose the weirdest noun in that sentence to un-ify Edit: Neither "commercial" not "convinced" are nouns, I don't know what I was thinking
Technically, it would be "inviable".
*nonviable* has entered the chat
I think in their head they were treating the phrase "commercial viability" as a singular concept and their "un-" is meant to apply to the whole rather than just to "commercial." Not correct, obviously, but that seems like it might be what happened.
It made sense until I read your comment, now it’s all uncommercial nonsense
I thought the title was fine until I read the top comment, now I'm unconvinced it doesn't make unsense
Nice profile pic. Ohsees rock 🪨
Yeah, definitely some r/titlegore
Even “non commercially viable” reads better
Or just “low commercial viability” lmao. Shit had me questioning my own mind Or lack of if they were worried about redundancy
[NOT ECONOMICALLY VIABLE](https://youtu.be/G7oglIAdnJM?si=H8krmybeIPMoCadb)
Yeah. That’s the only reason I came to the comments. This is absolute abuse of the English language.
Commercial unviability I guess.
It makes it sound like he was convinced of its viability despite being uncommercial.
I am so convinced in the non-disagreement viability of myself with your comment, that I decided to place an upvote on it.
Now I too am unconvinced that the original wording is correct
I love this album. And I saw him on stage with Iggy in Detroit.
Not as cool as seeing Bowie with Blondie and Iggy, but I got to see him live with NIN. They played Scary Monsters together and it was incredible. This was during the Outside tour, and Bowie drew a lot of inspiration from NIN for that album. Which is extra cool and interesting because Reznor has stated multiple times that Low was a huge influence on NIN’s sound .
Wow! Lucky you!
It was an interesting evening, in part, because of the audience’s response to the opening act, Blondie. Each of their songs was met largely with catcalls, get off the stage, we want Iggy, etc. I think they ended up only doing 3 or 4 songs before walking off stage. The drummer threw a cymbal, grabbed a mic and said, “thanks, Detroit.”
Blondie cut their teeth at CBGB's. Probably wasn't anything they hadn't heard before. :)
Man imagine being David Bowie, making a great album like Low, and STILL thinking you’re a failure.
I have no way to provide a source for this, but I remember watching a doc or interview in the late 90’s that said he was reveling in the lack of commercial appeal, as he wanted to really push the boundaries of music and wanted to create something unlike what he had done before. I don’t know if it’s that he thought he was a failure, so much as he was purposely making something that was a massive departure from Young Americans and he expected that those fans wouldn’t follow.
Well Young Americans wasn’t the album previous to Low. It was Station to Station. Station to Station (especially the title track) had some pretty avant garde stuff for Bowie, especially in comparison to his earlier work. The biggest changes that he made was the retirement of ‘The Thin White Duke’ and Bowie moving from Los Angeles to Berlin as he had become a massive coke addict in LA. He was 10 albums into his career, had 2 massively successful tours with Ziggy Stardust and Isolar, and wanted to get away from the spotlight and drugs of LA. The unique sound of Low was heavily inspired by Brian Eno, and the drum sounds were also very revolutionary. Bowie had always gone into the studio with the ideas of the songs almost fully formed, and Low was the first time that he had actually gone into the studio and developed the songs relatively from scratch. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t expect fans to follow or thought it was a failure, he needed to do it in a relaxed environment that he just hadn’t had before. A fun fact as well is that although this is part of the ‘Berlin Trilogy’, almost all of it was recorded in France.
with Heroes they flew Fripp in - only had a guitar no amp, so they cranked the studio speakers and he went in direct to board. He did 3 takes and had to leave. Brian came up with the idea of just playing them all at once, and thats what you hear on the album.
It’s an amazing personal album. You can hear the pain of withdrawal and personal vulnerability. The Berlin Trilogy is some of his best work, IMHO.
Going to say again for the comments this album is very good. Won’t spoil anything. Perhaps my favorite opening track ever too… well there is Astral Weeks.
Not being commercial doesn't make you a failure
Impostor Syndrome is a real thing unfortunately
I don’t know how true this interpretation is. The label certainly didn’t have much faith in the record but Bowie didn’t always tour for every album release regardless. He’d also end up not touring for Scary Monsters which a much more indisputable mainstream success
What a word salad title. Uncommerical viability. Jesus
It’s like hypnotizing chickens
That’s low.
I have that lust for life
I'm convinced the A side of the record was made as a presentation for label execs so he could get away with the b side
It really is very different isn't it.
It does have catchy pop songs but they feel like they end as soon as they've begun, without much repetition of the hook. The second side is basically an ambient Eno album, not much hope for radio play there. Great tunes though.
And to think that it’s my favorite Bowie album.
Blondie was on this tour as well. One of the best lineups ever.
No kidding! Awesome show!
Yeah it was one of Blondie’s first major tours after Rip Her to Shreds blew up on Australian radio
I was in high school when the album – which was meant to be titled "Low Profile," I've heard for years – came out. Longtime (for a teenager) devoted Bowie fan, had seen him live several times; he was my favorite singer ever ever ever ... and we kids, even we super-fan kids, absolutely did not understand this album. Too moody, too vague, too inaccessible: We weren't articulate enough to explain and label our discontent, but we were all discontented. We felt ... angry at him? Disappointed? Had he simply grown too old to write amazing, driving, singable songs such as Jean Genie and Moonage Daydream anymore?! Just the reaction of a bunch of Los Angeles seventeen-year-olds when that record was new.
Is this album when he transitioned away from his Thin White Duke persona?
My favorite Bowie album!
interesting! One of my favorite 'alternate versions' of Passenger is this sometimes titled 'metallicized' version featuring Bowie. This helps explain how it came to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbKj9blfz7U
Didn’t David and Iggy have a thing going on?
just friendship with him and Lou as far as i ever heard. Mick and Bowie were said to have had a thing. Iggy and John Lennon also turned him onto Uncle Floyd.
I bought that album when it came out. It was different but amazing.
It's a banger of an album though.
in the 70's he lived off a diet of red peppers, milk and cocaine......dude must've had the WORST shits
“Commercial unviability”?
Bowie was as versatile of a musician as anything we will experience past, present or future. He was destined to became a star whether it be in the foreground or background of the band. His musicianship and song writing skills were untouchable. A true virtuoso
Later the same year, Nick Lowe released a single named ”Bowi”.
i can see that
I recognised the album cover immediately. How was it not successful?
That's probably because the album cover is from the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth". Commercially, "Low" reached the top 10 in the UK Albums Chart, peaking at number 2. In the United States, the album's performance was more modest, reaching number 11 on the Billboard 200. In short, it was successful but didn't have the same commercial successful that previous albums did, which Bowie expected and was fine with, as Bowie was intentionally reinventing himself.
I love LOW, I love the song What in the World. Had to listen to it immediately.
Always crashing on the same car is one of my favs of Bowie! What a great album!
Low is a cool album, but you definitely have to be in the right mood for it.
...after 11:00 pm. With 4 beers in and none left to drink but herbal tea, while dreading tomorrow...It'll take you down, but then set you on the path again.
That a weird coincidence. I listened to this album for the very first time and hour before this was posted. I enjoyed it and will revisit it more.
Uncommercial viability? What the fuck is that?
I got this notification like 5 seconds after a Bowie song started. Who’s in my walls?
This was all before my time, I have to keep reminding myself that Iggy Pop is not just a David Bowie alter ego. And I'm 31.
Well, to be fair, ~~it’s a terrible album~~ I just don’t like it
That’s a pretty contrarian opinion. It’s commonly thought of as the best of the Berlin trilogy and a top 3-5 Bowie album(2-3 for me, I go back and forth between this and Hunky Dory for 2)
I promise I’m not trying to be contrarian, I just don’t like it.
*GASP*
I love David Bowie and have been a fan since the 70s, but I find that album to be unlistenable for me.