DAVID BOWIE - STATION TO STATION @ 45

 

January 23 marks the 45th anniversary of the release of David Bowie's 10th studio album, Station to Station, released on this day in 1976.

With Ziggy Stardust seeming like a distant memory by the time of this release, Bowie was firmly in the grip of his "Thin White Duke" persona and the epic cocaine habit that accompanied it. Bowie was so out of it at the time of this recording that he, and much of the band, remembered very little of its production beyond the distaste for Los Angeles and the belief that ""The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth". That decadence and indulgence, however, didn't stop them from creating one of Bowie's most seminal and significant albums.

Musically, it continues along the path of "blue eyed soul" that had been forged with the previous LP, Young Americans, but there were the seeds of intense experimentation being planted here that would set David's trajectory directly into the Brian Eno produced "Berlin Trilogy" throughout the remaining years of the decade. The core band of this album would also remain intact throughout this period as well with bassist George Murray, guitarist Carlos Alomar and drummer Dennis Davis.

Conceptually, the album is preoccupied with David's favorite muses of the era such as Aleister Crowley and occultism. Bowie was also involved in the filming of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and the character created for that feature became a central inspiration for his Thin White Duke persona, which Bowie described as "a hollow man who sang songs of romance with an agonized intensity, yet felt nothing — ice masquerading as fire". The persona has also been described as "a mad aristocrat", "an amoral zombie", and "an emotionless Aryan superman". For Bowie himself, the Duke was "a nasty character indeed"! Bowie became so possessed by the role at the time, with the help of the drugs, that he was often criticized for his close brushes with fascistic tendencies. Personally, he was a mess and deep into delusion and paranoia, with fantasies of witches stealing his semen, secret messages from The Rolling Stones and an irrational fear of fellow Crowley enthusiast, Jimmy Page. It's no wonder he'd flee to Berlin after touring the album to dry out and get his head on straight.

Despite all of the chaos and madness surrounding the times, we're still left with an incredible artifact of Bowie's genius, which even in the midst of his madness at the time, still managed to shine through and manifest an album that stood as a beacon for the emerging "new wave" of the late 1970s and still holds up today thanks to its unassailable song-craft and musicianship.