All Saints

All Saints.

The lesser of the two official Low outtakes, “All Saints” may not be from the Low sessions at all. There’s no reference to it being cut at Château d’Hérouville or Hansa in 1976, and it easily could be from the “Heroes” sessions in summer 1977. Or even later: some of it may have been recorded around the time of its release in 1991. The title is anachronistic enough, as it’s a tribute to Brian Eno’s record label, founded in ’91.

My guess is that “All Saints” is a few fragments from either/both the Low and “Heroes” sessions that were processed, diced up and smeared together by Eno and/or Bowie some time later. “All Saints” is initially striking and mixed well, the piece centered on a pulserate of a synth line while washes of sound come and go: a distorted guitar riff here, a secondary bassline there (the few suggestions of melody are in the basslines). It’s ominous enough but ultimately static and a bit dull. If “Some Are” is essential, this is a dubious footnote.

Recorded ca. 1976-1977, recorded and mixed in 1991 in Montreux. First released on the Ryko Low reissue, 1991, and later on the Bowie instrumental compilation of the same name.

Top: Tanner, Jonah Who Will Be 25 In the Year 2000, 1976.

Art Decade

Art Decade.
Art Decade (live, 1978).
Art Decade (live, 1978).
Art Decade (live, 2002).

“Art Decade” is the most Eno-esque track on Low, as Eno assembled much of the piece while Bowie was away from the studio on legal business (though Bowie has sole songwriting credit*). It’s reminiscent at times of Eno’s then-recent Another Green World—the percussion calls back to “The Big Ship,” while the “elephant trumpeting” sound (first heard at 0:39) is a cousin of Robert Fripp’s synth-processed guitar riff on “Sky Saw.”

It began as a piano composition for four hands; Bowie thought it didn’t work and put it in the discard pile. When Bowie went off to Paris, however, Eno, left on his own at Château d’Hérouville, revived “Art Decade” and added layers of synthesizers to it (primarily ARPs, a Minimoog and his “suitcase” EMS Synthi). Upon his return, Bowie took Eno’s tapes and added further layers to them—the percussion, for example, was done on Bowie’s Chamberlin. The cello that underscores the bassline (particularly from 1:05 to 1:25) was played by Hansa Studios engineer Eduard Meyer.

Eno suggested that rather than getting Dennis Davis back for a drum track, they should record a metronome clicking a specified number of times while Tony Visconti, recorded on another track, called out each click number in sequence. Bowie and Eno thus had a readymade compositional map (so, to pick a random example, Visconti’s “33” would be the cue for a cello entrance, or a fresh synthesizer line). The intention was to free Bowie and Eno from strictures of popular music: no time signatures, no chord progressions, no bar structures. (Bowie and Eno used a similar method on “Warszawa” and “Weeping Wall.”)

That said, “Art Decade” isn’t that radical. After its brief (12-second) percussive opening, it consists of two distinct, alternating sections (much like “A New Career In a New Town”). There’s a nine-bar (or if you’d like, 36-metronome-click) main theme, a slow traversing from E flat to D major and back to Eb and E major. The main melody is a descending four-note line (sometimes with all notes flatted) that’s eventually severed: it’s reduced to a two-note phrase, then just a single whole note. Repetitions of this decayed melody (Bowie’s title possibly puns on this) make up the piece’s other main section—alternating patterns of two stepwise descending notes and two notes rising a half-step.

Eno had spent late summer 1976 at Harmonia’s studio in Forst, Germany (Harmonia was a super-group of sorts, a collaboration of Michael Rother (Neu!) and Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster)). They had jammed, experimented, run through a few songs, and Eno had left saying he would return soon to make a proper record. Instead Eno went to France to work with Bowie on Low. The tapes from the Eno/Harmonia sessions, which didn’t surface until 1997, show some similarities to Eno’s subsequent work with Bowie: the interlocking, repeating patterns of “By the Riverside,” for example. Yet many of the Harmonia/Eno tracks like “Aubade,” “Welcome” and “Sometimes In Autumn” have a much freer sense of tempo and construction—the pieces progress, sometimes rhythmically, sometimes melodically, in a logical but unpredictable design; they have the lightness of indulged thoughts. “Art Decade,” by contrast, feels confined, even claustrophobic; its beauties are funereal, a brief procession through ruins.

Bowie called “Art Decade” a thematic counterpart to “Subterraneans,” with the former an alleged musical portrait of West Berlin in the shadow of the Wall. And in turn “Art Decade”‘s two sections could stand for the severed halves of Berlin: the melancholy West set against the stasis of the East, the decay of Romanticism met by the austere promise of Minimalism (Eno and Bowie were familiar with the Minimalists, having both attended a performance of Philip Glass’ Music With Changing Parts in London in 1971).

Recorded September 1976 at Château d’Hérouville, overdubs at Hansa, Berlin. Played on the 1978 tour, generally as a palate cleanser before the closer “Station to Station” (a version from Philadelphia is on Stage) and in 2002. A likely influence on Eric Serra’s soundtrack work, particularly 1989’s Le Grand Bleu.

*Eno is credited as co-composer of “Art Decade” on the 1978 live record Stage, while Bowie is sole composer on the BMI copyright.

Top: Anselm Kiefer, Varus, 1976.

Some Are

Some Are.
Some Are (Philip Glass, “Low Symphony,” 1993 (Pt.1)). (Pt. 2)

A quiet little piece Brian Eno and I wrote in the Seventies. The cries of wolves in the background are sounds that you might not pick up on immediately. Unless you’re a wolf.

David Bowie, on “Some Are,” 2008.

Are there lost Low songs? An apocryphal quote by Tony Visconti, allegedly claiming that there are “dozens of bittersweet songs” left over from Low, seems to be the main source of this rumor (I’ve also seen references on DB message boards that Visconti said something similar about Lodger, for what it’s worth).

Bowie is said to be assembling a deluxe reissue of Low, which presumably would include some of these mysterious bittersweet songs. Yet the release date of this epic reissue regularly gets pushed into the future (it originally was supposed to come out in 2007), and the chances that any new material will appear on it are…low. After all, Station to Station, reissued with grand fanfare last year in a massive boxed set, had no new music on it besides the heavily-bootlegged ’76 Nassau concert—no demos, no outtakes, no alternate takes or mixes, nada.

Bowie has always been sparing with his outtake releases (though he lets the world and his wife remix his songs). Perhaps it reflects a perfectionist’s dislike of letting out into the world various half-finished songs and inferior takes. I imagine also that Bowie, like any good magician, wants to keep up illusions. He’s an avid recycler of his own material, and for all we know “Ashes to Ashes” began during the Low sessions, or “Blue Jean” was originally some reggae thing he did on Lodger.

There are two “official” outtakes from Low: one, “All Saints,” is a bit of a ringer, a Low fragment reworked and titled in the early 1990s. By contrast, the other outtake, “Some Are,” is an essential piece of Low‘s sound puzzle, and it’s canonical enough that Philip Glass used it as part of his Low symphony.

“Some Are,” a collaboration solely between Bowie and Brian Eno, bears some resemblances to “Warszawa,” particularly in its somber piano opening, the same chords played eight times (the tolling continues throughout the rest of the piece, though confined to the right channel). But “Some Are” is on a much smaller stage than “Warszawa”; it’s a haiku (a few syllables too long) to “Warszawa”‘s epic. Bowie’s four-line lyric initially seems comprehensible, unlike the phonetic new language of “Warszawa” or the bizarre code of “Subterraneans,” but Bowie’s singing is shaded enough, and the words he chose have enough homonyms, that the lines lack any definitive meaning. Is it “summer bound to fade” or “some are bound to fail”? “Some are winter sun,” “summer-winter sun”? or “some will win too soon”? “Sleigh bells in snow” or “sailors in snow”? (It really sounds like the former.)

Its composer, writing about “Some Are” some twenty years later, tweaked those who tried to read anything into its handful of vague images. The song was about “the failed Napoleonic force stumbling back through Smolensk. Finding the unburied corpses of their comrades left from their original advance on Moscow,” Bowie said. “Or possibly a snowman with a carrot for a nose; a crumpled Crystal Palace Football Club admission ticket at his feet. A Weltschmerz [world weariness] indeed. Send in your own images, children, and we’ll show the best of them next week.”

Recorded Château d’Hérouville, September 1976, and/or Hansa, Berlin; completed (and mixed) at Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland, 1991. On the 1991 Ryko reissue of Low (out of print) and the 2008 compilation iSelect.

Top: Phillipe Hernot, “2Cv en Eure et Loir,” 1976.

Subterraneans

Subterraneans.
Subterraneans (played backwards).
Subterraneans (Philip Glass, “Low Symphony,” 1993).
Subterraneans (Bowie, live, with Nine Inch Nails, 1995).
Subterraneans (live, 2002).

When Low was released in January 1977, the journalist Wesley Strick asked an RCA “operative” what he thought of its second side. “It’s avant garde. It’s ambitious. Frankly, I think it needs more work,” he said. How about the LP closer, “Subterraneans”? “Religious,” he sighed.

Low‘s working title was New Music: Night and Day, and its sequencing is similar to Neu! 75, which also had two distinct sides—the A side by the “classic” minimalist two-man Neu!, the other recorded with a larger ensemble and its tracks unconventional even by Neu! standards.* As Brian Eno described it, Low‘s “day” side was “seven quite manic disco numbers, like Station to Station carried with gritted teeth…they’re all really short and they’ve got interesting shapes.” And the “night” side, Eno said, was like “soundtrack music.”

In some cases, the four near-instrumentals on Low‘s B side literally were soundtrack music—“Subterraneans” has its origins in the score Bowie had composed in 1975 for The Man Who Fell to Earth (though Bowie later said that the “reverse bass part” is the only piece of the track directly taken from the scrapped soundtrack)—and Bowie cast the four pieces as incidental music for a tour of an imaginary Eastern Europe. Bowie had only seen Poland and East Germany through the windows of a train (or in short day trips, see “Warszawa“). He used Communist Europe as a screen on which he projected the isolate’s visions and paranoiac observations of Low‘s “manic” side; it was a map of deliberate misreading, whole countries colonized by the imagination.

So “Subterraneans,” according to Bowie’s schema, was about the people remaining in East Berlin after the Wall was built, “the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was.” From 1949 through August 1961, some three million Germans went into the West via Berlin: as Tony Judt noted, it wasn’t just the intelligentsia or the professionals who left, but farmers (fleeing collectivization) and laborers. Nearly 16% of the entire population of East Germany had escaped before the Wall was built. Those who were left behind, who were trapped behind the Wall, were something of a Preterite—souls who didn’t make the cut, people consigned to a ghost life behind the curtain.

This, of course, was the Cold War West’s official view of those living in the Eastern bloc. I am of the last generation to remember the Wall and East Germany, so I can offer the cultural stereotype of the East common in Reagan’s America: a perpetual winter; everyone confined to shabby apartments, where your neighbors are spying on you, and your phone is likely tapped; empty streets; bread queues; classical music on the radio; a grey world of chess masters, secret poets and gymnasts. Eastern Europe was Narnia under the White Witch, or, officially, it was the Second World: a place similar enough to the West (industrialized, anomic) to be recognizable but a world seemingly reduced in scope, life in half measures. “East Berlin, can’t buy a thing—there’s nothing they can sell me,” the Mekons’ Jon Langford sang in “Memphis, Egypt,” the year the Wall was torn down. He had already gone through the wall before then, Langford sings, in commercial rock music, traveling like an airborne plague. (It’s helpful to remember that this was the Mekons’ sole, very brief period on a major label).

The Sex Pistols single “Holidays in the Sun,” recorded a few months after Bowie finished Low, finds Johnny Rotten standing at the foot of the Wall, a tourist despising his tour package, feverish with the West’s toxins (the “sensurround sound” and “two-inch wall” of television), hearing the stamp of marching feet in his head. Berlin was the grotesque capitalist carnival of the West, running all night, its blare met by the silence of its Eastern half (the Pistols had fled London for Berlin in the summer of ’77). The song reaches a peak of horror—Rotten stands on top of the Wall, looks across and down, and finds “them” staring back at him. He shrieks. The empty half, the sons of the silent age. The realization that West Berlin is the elect as judged, and condemned, by the damned. The song careers to an end. Did Rotten jump, did he go back home? The story’s never finished. The Wall remains, until it, too, is swept away, eventually broken to pieces live on television. East Berlin made safe for chain stores and rock & roll at last.

Bowie’s song offers a romance instead. “Subterraneans” is somber, delusive, beautiful; it’s a love song for the abandoned. Its title comes from Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novella The Subterraneans, whose title phrase, Kerouac’s narrator (the ludicrously-named “Leo Percepeid”) says, was coined by Adam Moorad (Allen Ginsberg): “They are hip without being slick, they are intellectual as hell…they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.” Something like Bowie’s old Tibetans, his wild-eyed boys and supermen. Bowie ends his most depressive record with an attempted, broken reconciliation with the figures of his imagination. The track ends with the creak of a chair in the studio, breaking the spell. Bowie is still trapped in his head, East Berlin goes on without him.

Failing stars

“Subterraneans” sometimes is described as being free-form, a random collection of sounds, but it has a discernible structure: it consists of seven repetitions of a 16-bar “chorus”. The chorus has what initially seems like a baffling set of changing time signatures, but the constantly-changing times of “Subterraneans” eventually make up a broader A-B-A-B pattern. As in:

1 “chorus”:
Bars 1-4: 3/4, 4/4, 4/4, 3/4 (“A”)
Bars 5-8: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 3/4 (“B”)
Bars 9-12: 3/4, 4/4, 4/4, 3/4 (“A”)
Bars 13-16: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 3/4 (“B”)

The five-note bassline helps keeps the ear grounded. It appears twice in each 16-bar section, at the start and at the midpoint (bars 8-9). Whenever you find yourself lost, wait for the next bassline and it will put you back on the map. Once the underlying structure is visible, “Subterraneans” seems far more orderly: the vocal chants begin at the start of the third chorus, Bowie’s saxophone kicks off the fifth repeat, and the vocal “chorus” is most of the sixth.

Share bride fail-/ ling so / Care-/line Careline (A)
Careline/ Careline driving me / Shirley Shirley Shirley oh–/–wn (B)
Share /bride failing /sta–/–arrr (A)

“Words…reconfigured into a completely private language, as the ultimate act of autism,” Hugo Wilcken wrote. The lyric of “Warszawa,” as we’ll see, seems to be an attempt at making a universal language, a common collection of vowels and phrasings. By contrast, the baffling lines of “Subterraneans,” a distress letter written in code, seem far stranger, as though sung by someone whose grasp of language had slipped away upon waking one morning.**

The alienated words are matched by the sounds of “Subterraneans,” which are either synthetic (the various ARPs serve as a replacement for a solo violin line, among other things) or recycled, with much its backdrop consisting of waves of backwards tapes (Carlos Alomar’s guitar, Bowie’s Rhodes Electric piano). The exception is Bowie’s saxophone, which plays two elegiac solos. It’s religious, as the baffled RCA operative once said.

Recorded at (possibly) Cherokee Studios, December 1975, Château d’Hérouville, September 1976, and Hansa, Berlin, Sept.-October 1976. Used by Philip Glass as the basis for the first movement of his Low Symphony, 1993. Performed in 1995, with Nine Inch Nails, and in 2002 (the concert recording linked above is spoiled by some asshole in the crowd giving his friend directions, but it’s the best I could find).

* LPs sequenced with a “fast” and “slow” side (or “a side for dancin’, a side for romancin'”) are pretty common: Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (one side electric, one side acoustic), Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure (Side A Ferry, Side B Eno), the Stones’ Tattoo You, etc.

** It’s reminiscent of an episode of the revived Twilight Zone of the mid-’80s. Robert Klein is a middle-aged man who slowly realizes that everyone around him has begun speaking a new English, where all words have exchanged meanings. The episode ends with Klein, alone and scared, trying to teach himself the new language by reading a child’s book. He stares at a picture of a dog and repeats, “Wednesday. Wednesday.”

Top: Barbara Klemm, “Blick über die Mauer, West-Berlin, 1977.”