David Bowie‘s Low is an album with its own split personality. On side one you get the interesting guitar stuff, heavily treated and effected tracks that cut against the punkish musical landscape of the era. On side two you get the icy cool of Bowie’s (and Eno’s) mainly vocal-free take on Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and the new sounds he’s been soaking up in Berlin.
Even the synths on the record have split personality. On side two, they glide with slow, peaceful majesty, their glazed, chromium sheen teleporting Bowie and his gang into a cocooned and shiny, space age-y future.
On side one though, they fizz and spark, adding a layer of Brunel-ish heavy industry to the tracks; Speed Of Life whooshes in on a rapid fade-in, immediately disorientating, as if you’ve walked in on a band already half way through their thing. Breaking Glass is over in a groovy flash, a Teutonic military two step that somehow gives birth to the sound of Franz Ferdinand amongst its sub-two minute robotic funk. Sound And Vision‘s steam-powered rhythm section hisses and pops its way into the top ten like a Clydeside shipbuilders’ yard in 1901.
The whole side is coated in interesting and forward-looking instrumentation.
At the heart of it though – and you’ve no doubt picked up on this – is that all of them feature fantastically-recorded drums; live, in the room – in your room – slap-heavy snare, reverberating toms, kick-like-a-mule bass…Dennis Davis sounds terrific across everything here. Low is considered a progressive, era-changing album (as it should), but little has been made of just how goddam in-your-face percussive it all is. Next time you listen to Low – properly, on a turntable or a CD (not a crappy mp3 like the one below) – hone in on the drums and rhythms and be dazzled
I’ve long-held a fascination for Always Crashing In the Same Car. I love the unfolding, slo-mo drama of it all. Verlaine-ish vapour trails of linear guitar, interesting chords, a bassline that would be played twice as fast and employed later on Heroes, Bowie’s voice close in your ear, low one moment, sky-high the next, his phrasing never less than immaculate. It occurred to me just there as I listened again that he even employs a sneaky wee strung out but nonetheless Beatleish ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah‘ vocal adlib midway through. Listen out for it – it’s unmistakable. The more you listen, it seems, the more you spot, even all this time later. Ask a random to make a list of their ten favourite Bowie tracks and it won’t be there…but it probably should be.
David Bowie – Always Crashing In the Same Car
Is it a study in cocaine psychosis? Bowie was living on a diet of milk, red peppers and Grade A pop star-quality pharmaceuticals at this point, so it may well be. Or is it Bowie’s metaphorical confession of a life collapsing around him as he makes the same mistake time and again? It may well be both?
Or it may, as some biographers have claimed, be Bowie’s retelling of the time he and Iggy Pop were cruising the Berlin city street late at night when they happened upon a dealer who’d recently ripped Bowie off. Off his head on drugs, or just off is head in general, Bowie chose to repeatedly ram his Mercedes into his former dealer’s car, then made his escape to the underground car park of the hotel he was living in and drove around in circles until his ire had subsided.
That ‘Jas-amine…I saw you peeping….when I put my foot down to the floor,‘ line. Some say ‘Jesamine’ is an alias for Iggy Pop. Others say it’s an alias for Bowie himself, writing in third person as he watches is own behaviour from the sidelines.
That can’t be right, that story, can it? Can it?
As unlikely as it sounds, Bowie himself introduced the song during his 1999 VH1 Storytellers performance with a very similar preamble, so who knows. You’ll find clips of the song online, but search as I have, I can’t find the video evidence of the song’s introduction for absolute proof. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I say.
Plain Or Pan