Station to Station David Bowie RCA; 1 975
originally published October 2, 2012 on Probably Just Hungry
The thing you’ll always hear about Bowie is that he’s a shapeshifter. An artist whose style and practice hardly ever stayed in one place. It’s a state of mind he perhaps shares with some of history’s most famous figures — Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso included. It’s definitely not my place to say that someone like Bowie had as much comprehensive global influence as a Renaissance man who embraced hard science as much as art, or a small Spaniard who opened up the raw essence of art through abstraction. On a musical scale, yes, David Bowie is important. Too important to ignore, too talented to be disputed as the center of modern music, and at least on par with the Beatles. Taking into account the ways he built off cultural impact the band had on popular music, he just might surpass their modern relevancy. I’ve met plenty of David Bowie fans who plant themselves firmly on a single era of the man’s career. People have and still do devote themselves to the celestial glamour of Ziggy Stardust or the fluid electronic experimentations of his Berlin era, and the echo of his mid-80s radio hits still shows up on the charts from time to time. Every character he plays is a performance dripping with bravado and mastery, but the real keystone of this sweeping catalogue is in the stolid fragility of the Thin White Duke, as seen and heard on Station to Station. The 1 975 album is a famously transitional effort, bisecting the plastic soul of Young Amer- icans and the ascetic hum of Low. The cover is a still from Bowie’s first major motion picture, The Man Who Fell to Earth, wherein he plays the title character Thomas Jerome Newton, entering the spaceship that will return him to his home planet. (Just to clarify, the original artwork is a cropped, black-and-white version of the same still, though this reissue cover does more to shape the sound of the album.) In more ways than one, the moment in Newton’s journey from one planet to another is a integral part of the album. Bowie, then based in Los Angeles, retrospectively identified La La Land to be
the toxic land that finally broke him, saying ”the fucking place should be wiped off the face of the Earth.” (For those keeping score, he would then move to Berlin to record the wildly experimental Low, Heroes and Lodger albums.) The change in style between the thoroughly plastic LA soul and West German motorik can also be seen as a transitions from a high-flying cocaine-peppersand-milk lifestyle to the stark withdrawal-induced migraines accenting the Berlin trilogy. On Station to Station, Bowie, like Newton on the cover, sticks his head into the space capsule and takes a glimpse of the vehicle of his transport. "TVC 1 5" ”TVC 1 5” is not the poppiest track on the album, and neither is it the strongest link to plastic soul. (Both roles are filled by ”Golden Years”.) It is, however, an almost even mixture of new and old, leaning more towards the old. From the falsetto backing vocals to the subject matter (a TV set eating a girl, allegedly Iggy Pop’s girlfriend), the song drips with Bowie’s signature quirk. The somehow off-kilter cadence and the cabaret-style piano toe the line between traditional and innovative. The real signpost to Bowie’s future, however, lies in the odd, screeching guitar that hums in the background of the verses. It’s more apparent on the vinyl version, but if you listen closely, you can hear the type of flutter heard in Low closer ”All Saints”. "Station To Station" Perhaps the defining statement of the album comes in the form of the opener and title track, a progressive 1 0-minute epic that introduces the Thin White Duke and represents 1 /5 of the album’s running time. Bowie wasn’t ever really one for subtlety, especially at this point in his career. The track is one of the most comprehensive cuts off the album, bolstered by the use of sound effects far more effectively than on Diamond Dogs and the spiraling mysticism and lore of Bowie’s new persona. The chaos of the first section is contrasted with the heavy beat of a funeral dirge . At almost the exact midpoint, the track shifts to an upbeat tempo but retains the same darkness with lines like ”It’s not the side effects of the cocaine / I’m thinking that it must be love.” It’s this cynicism that defines his character and the transition, and he even goes on to say, rather presciently, that ”the European Canon is near,” somehow predicting the change in locale and style, and even the high regard with which Bowie fans hold the Berlin trilogy. By the end of the album, which closes with the excellent Nina Simone tune ”Wild is the Wind”, it seems that the Thin White Duke has emptied himself of the bitterness present on the opening track, bringing the character to the same level as the artist playing him. It’s at the moment of this final track that the cover is the most pertinent — when Bowie’s fugue of disenchantment is exhausted — and all that’s left is to look to the vehicle towards the next era.