This year marks the anniversaries of two of David Bowie’s most compelling and powerful albums: 1976’s Station to Station and 2016’s Blackstar. Given that they are often – rightly – described as Bowie’s crowning artistic achievements, amid severe competition from his other releases, they also have the intriguing fillip that both were originally released in January: a fortunate time for the musician, who was born on January 8, 1947, even if it was also the month in which he finally departed this Earth.
Yet the comparisons between Station to Station and Blackstar, which came out 40 years apart, are far more pervasive – and persuasive – than the serendipity of their release dates. Both records contain a relatively small number of songs (six on Station to Station, seven on Blackstar), with a ten-minute title track on each that shifts through a variety of musical influences and styles, as well as a similarly wide palette of tones and ideas on the remainder of the album.
The appeal lies not just in the music, but in knowing the albums were recorded in dramatic circumstances
Whether you’re discussing “Lazarus” or “Dollar Days” on Blackstar or “Golden Years” and the dramatic “Word on a Wing” from Station to Station, you are unquestionably talking about Bowie at his finest and most creative. As he sang on Station to Station, “Got to be searching and searching…oh what will I be believing, and who will connect me with love?”
The appeal of both albums lies not just in their music, but in the knowledge that they were recorded in dramatic, even unique, circumstances. Station to Station was a product of Bowie’s prodigious cocaine use, which had begun in mid-1974, around the time of the notoriously debauched Diamond Dogs tour, and had gone on for years afterwards. Clear evidence of how out of it the star was can be seen in Alan Yentob’s 1975 documentary Cracked Actor – another January premiere – in which Bowie alternates between lucidity and mania, even as he attempts to take on perhaps his most consequential role as a (cracked) actor in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Bowie was, appropriately enough, cast as an otherworldly alien, and while he gives perhaps his finest onscreen performance as the icily detached Thomas Jerome Newton, the knowledge that he was subsisting offscreen on a diet of red peppers, milk and cocaine – a lot of cocaine – makes it as chilling to watch as it is fascinating.
It would be salutary to describe Station to Station as Bowie’s clean-up album, but in fact it is nothing of the kind. Instead, he gathered one of his best bands, including Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick on guitar, George Murray on bass and Dennis Davis on drums; all had been, or would become, regular collaborators of his, although producer Harry Maslin, who had also worked on Bowie’s “plastic soul” album Young Americans, would not work with him again afterward. It is not hard to see why the recording and release of Station to Station was a nerve-racking time for all involved. Bowie decided to debut the latest and most sinister of all his personae, the so-called “Thin White Duke” (pictured), an icy, immaculately dressed European fascist who appeared to have goose-stepped, fully formed, from the pages of an Isherwood or Mann novel.
In interviews, Bowie seemed to disappear into his character. He spoke fervently about the need for a right-wing government and claimed, “I am the only alternative for the premier in England. I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.”
In the studio, meanwhile, he exerted a similar level of control, coming in with his songs already written (including a cover of “Wild is the Wind,” as popularized by Johnny Mathis in 1957) and then expecting his band to experiment with different approaches in order to maximize their impact. That these included some of the greatest songs he had ever written, or ever would write, meant that his prodigious drug intake was doing something right artistically, if not personally.
Bowie seemed at least half-aware of the impact that his behavior was having on his work – “Station to Station” contains the unforgettable, incomparably Bowie line, “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine / I’m thinking that it must be love” – but he ignored its detrimental consequences until long after the album was finished. He commented in several interviews later in life that he had next to no recollection of making the album, saying in 1987 that “I was so blocked… so stoned… It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it. I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely.”
The results belied Bowie’s mental and physical state. The album was a significant commercial hit in both the United States and Britain, reaching number three on the Billboard chart and number five in the UK, and eventually sold nearly three and a half million copies: a significant number for such a dark, strange release. He somehow managed to tour it, too, on the Isolar jaunt of 1976, where he visited America and Europe in a suitably blitzed-up state. When the tour was concluded, he headed to Berlin, in the company of his friend Iggy Pop, quit the drugs and began work with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno on the album that would become Low. It was, appropriately enough, another masterpiece.
Nearly four decades later, Bowie was in the studio once again, but this time mortality was clouding his artistic process, rather than drugs. The circumstances under which Blackstar were recorded were barely known in his lifetime, thanks to the secrecy that Bowie imposed on his collaborators, but after his sudden, barely anticipated demise, details became far clearer. After the acclaim and commercial success that accompanied his grand 2013 comeback The Next Day, Bowie began making plans to return to the studio almost immediately, but this time he dispensed with the musicians he had been working with, off and on, for much of the previous two decades, and instead recruited Donny McCaslin and his jazz quartet to record the album with him.
The results were incendiary, wrongfooting anyone who believed that they could predict what Bowie would do next – just as Station to Station had baffled anyone who was expecting Young Americans part two. Songs such as “Blackstar” and “Lazarus,” which might have been more conventionally “rock” if they had had different arrangements and instrumentation, sounded like little else in Bowie’s canon – but they could not be described as free jazz, either.
Nearly four decades later, Bowie was back in the studio, but this time mortality was clouding his process
Instead, over a septet of beautiful, menacing songs – two of which, “Sue” and “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” had been teased in different arrangements in 2014 – the musician dealt, at times obliquely and at times with startling directness, with his own impending demise. Just as Station to Station alternated between the cryptic and the apparently straightforward, both lyrically and musically, so Blackstar ended up being far more comprehensible than it initially seemed, once the question of what Bowie was doing – and why – was answered.
Both albums, however, retain the air of enigma at their heart. On Station to Station, it’s the question of whether a drug-addled Bowie really was sure that, on the album’s soaring centerpiece “Word on a Wing,” he was “ready to shake the scheme of things,” or that he instead stood by his remarks, made in April 1975, that he was retiring from the music industry on the grounds that “I’ve rocked my roll. It’s a boring dead end. There will be no more rock ’n’ roll records or tours from me. The last thing I want to be is some useless fucking rock singer.”
Three decades later, after a near-fatal onstage heart attack in 2004, it once again seemed as if Bowie had retired, this time for good. Yet something – the lure of posterity, the desire to give his fans one final gift? – led to 2013’s The Next Day, and then finally, fatefully, to Blackstar.
Music aficionados and Bowie biographers have already spent much of the past decade picking over Blackstar and comparing it to the artist’s other albums – usually Station to Station, admittedly, but also to everything from Low and Black Tie White Noise to his underappreciated 1993 release The Buddha of Suburbia. Yet the appeal of Bowie is that no two albums of his were truly alike, and that each had its own distinct atmosphere and appeal.
Blackstar and Station to Station share a great deal of DNA, and listening to them back-to-back makes for a bracing, fascinating hour and a quarter. But ultimately they stand alone as similarly extraordinary artworks by a great musician who refused to go quietly into that good night but decided, just over a decade ago, to delve into territory that by his own admission he barely remembered, just to see how he got on. The results are fascinating, unique and inimitably Bowie – and we should be grateful for this parting gift forever.
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