Speed of Life

Speed of Life.
Speed of Life (live, 1978).
Speed of Life (live, 2002).

Low begins mid-sentence, its opening track suddenly fading up, and soon enough “Speed of Life” establishes its strict parameters—it’s a grid whose sections are composed in turn of shorter repeated pieces. There’s a 16-bar “chorus” section built of 4-bar repeats, which in turn are sets of 2 bars of lead guitar riffs and 2 bars dominated by a descending synthesizer line. Then there’s a 5-bar “bridge,” where the song briefly moves to the relative minor (“Life” is in E-flat, and moves here to G minor), and an 8-bar “verse,” the loveliest section of the track, where two synthesizers duet, a soprano Chamberlin and a tenor ARP 2600 (it’s the most Kraftwerk-esque moment on Low—a sound straight off Radio-Activity).

Like its bookend “A New Career In a New Town,” “Speed of Life” was meant to have lyrics, but Bowie may have realized a vocal would only dilute the track’s strong melodic flavor. Instead “Life” serves as an overture to the record, the cast of characters tumbling out on stage at once—Dennis Davis’ thudding Harmonized drums, George Murray’s typically crafty bass playing (where the rest of the instruments are descending in the “chorus,” Murray moves up in the last bar of each repeat), more stock from Carlos Alomar’s endless supply of guitar riffs and Brian Eno’s precise chaos. Bowie, however, was likely responsible for the descending synth line, a sound seemingly generated by a piston steam engine, as it’s the reincarnated “Laughing Gnome” bassoon riff (also heard as a synthesized vocal line at the end of “Fame”).

As structured as “Life” is, there’s still a sense of flow and improvisation under it all, from the various ways Davis plays his brief fills to how the synthesizer line begins to break out of its established patterns in the final chorus repeat. The title, a play on “speed of light,” could also be a twist on “tree of Life,” the Kabbalistic image that Bowie had been obsessed with during Station to Station. It’s another hint that Low is in part Bowie’s send-up of his earlier occult ramblings, and that as depressive and stark as the record can be, there’s also a real sense of play in it.

Recorded September 1976 at Château d’Hérouville; overdubs September-October, Hansa, Berlin. Issued as the B-side of “Be My Wife,” April 1977. Performed live in 1978 (on Stage) and in the Heathen tour of 2002.

Top: Romy Schneider, Berlin, 1976.

Breaking Glass

Breaking Glass.
Breaking Glass (extended single, 1978).
Breaking Glass (live, 1978).
Breaking Glass (live, 1983).
Breaking Glass (live, 1995).
Breaking Glass (live, 1996).
Breaking Glass (live, 2002).
Breaking Glass (live, 2004).

Interviewed a quarter-century after he made Low, David Bowie griped about its alleged influences. Not just Low being called Bowie’s reaction to punk (which it predated—it was mastered before the Sex Pistols released “Anarchy in the U.K.”) but also what he said was critics’ over-emphasis of the likes of Kraftwerk at the expense of the American musicians—Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar and George Murray—who were the backbone of the record.

“Kraftwerk’s percussion sound was produced electronically, rigid in tempo, unmoving. Ours was the mangled treatment of a powerfully emotive drummer, Dennis Davis. The tempo not only ‘moved’ but also was expressed in more than ‘human’ fashion. Kraftwerk supported that unyielding machinelike beat with all synthetic sound-generating sources. We used an R&B band,” Bowie said in 1999.

The mangled treatment of a brilliant R&B band is the story of Low‘s first side—Alomar, Davis and Murray (plus the English keyboardist Roy Young, and, about a week into the session, the Scotsman Ricky Gardiner) were the first crew of the record’s builders, jamming in the studio all night for two weeks, with little direct guidance by Bowie, who’d written no lyrics and scarcely any vocal melodies. At this point, he only offered some chord progressions and tempo directions. Then the musicians shipped off, leaving Brian Eno to provide variables (Eno’s contribution to “Glass” is a scribbling on the carpet—a three-note descending bleat, panned across the stereo mix, on a Minimoog; it sounds like a child fiddling with a keyboard knob) and Bowie and Tony Visconti to turn the sessions into a record.

“Breaking Glass,” officially credited to Bowie, Murray and Davis, is the most compelling groove on the album, despite it being left in a something of an embryonic state. Murray holds the track together with his fingers: the thudding echoing of Davis’ drums in the intro/refrain, the rolling bassline under the verses, which becomes the lead instrument in the final, vocal-less verse that gets faded out. Alomar’s lead guitar (he also plays rhythm guitar, a drone that Alomar described as his attempt to sound like a Jew’s harp) gets a battlefield promotion to secondary vocalist. His opening pair of riffs, phrases echoing and answering each other, are a more melodic hook than anything Bowie sings.

And Davis, who Visconti later called ‘the most original drummer I’ve ever worked with,” delivers beats that had never been on a Bowie record before: Low makes Ziggy Stardust sound like it was recorded on paper drums. (It’s as if he’s trying to imitate and yet outplay the synthetic drums on Cluster’s “Caramel”.) The trick was Visconti’s Eventide Harmonizer, which Visconti legendarily claimed “fucks with the fabric of time.” For Low, Visconti used the Harmonizer to sample the drum audio and, an instant later, echo the sound, but with the drums’ pitch dropped a semi-tone. Then Visconti, in his words, “added the feedback of this tone to itself.” So when Davis hit his snare drum, he heard in his headphones the “crack” but the following “thud” never stopped, it just deepened and deepened in tone. Visconti described the latter as sounding like a man struck in the stomach (forever).

At first, Bowie was unsure about the distorted drum sound, so Visconti sneakily turned down the effect in the control room but kept it on in Davis’ headphones. So on “Glass” (and other Low tracks) Davis is dueting with his echo, in real time. He’s varying the power and length of his snare hits, especially on the one! one! one-two! one-two! pattern in the intro, and seems to be creating the massive synthesized, gated drum sound of ’80s pop music in the process.

With “Breaking Glass,” Bowie took what could have been a soul groove piece like “Golden Years” and whittled it to a fragment, an open suggestion of a song, and gave it a brief, deranged-sounding vocal. Hugo Wilcken: “The lyric is like a conversational fragment in which a psychotic who has just trashed his girlfriend’s room is telling her that she’s the mad one.” As with “What in the World,” Bowie’s phrasing is seemingly random: “Late-ly…I’ve…BEEN…break-ing…glass in your ROOM again….LISTEN.” It’s a vocal reduced to basic rhythms: the two-beat “lately,” stuck on one note, then the stepwise “I’ve been,” and so on, a pattern repeated in the second verse: “Don’t-look…at the CARpet….I-drew-some-thing…AWFULONIT….See?” And what passes for a chorus: a line that doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t scan, which is shaken by Bowie’s sudden octave jump on “Oh-oh-OH-Oh!”

In part “Glass” is a tiny exorcism of Bowie’s Los Angeles period, a repudiation of his recent excesses. The florid language of “Station to Station” is reduced to 35 common words, while “Station”‘s extravagant harmonic structure is replaced by just two chords, the tonic (A) and the dominant (E). It’s also a sign of Bowie’s inability to expand upon basic ideas in the Low sessions—you get the sense he’s exhausted with conventional songwriting, unable or unwilling to come up with further lines, or a bridge, or even an ending. The sudden fadeout doesn’t suggest that the song’s been interrupted, but it’s more a mercy: a minute into the song, there’s already a sense it’s going nowhere.

In concerts, compelled to make “Glass” more substantial, Bowie repeated verses and made a dramatic close-out, with everyone chanting “I’ll never touch you” over drum fills. A piece of chamber music, it sometimes struggled on stage, notably when Bowie opened a victory-lap Milton Keynes Bowl concert in 1983 with it. Here the performance seems to be a desperate attempt to prevent the song from dissipating in the summer air. A horn section and ceaseless guitar wailing do what they can to distract, Bowie sings his lines with cool assurance, but something’s off-putting about the performance: it’s like a homicidal diary entry being read on a Jumbotron screen.

Recorded September 1976 at Château d’Hérouville, with overdubs in October-November 1976 at Hansa Studios, Berlin. A live recording from spring 1978, included on Stage, was issued as the single from that record (RCA BOW 1).

An inadvertent parody is Nick Lowe’s “(I Love The Sound of) Breaking Glass,” with its Murray-esque bassline and Eno-like interruptions on piano. Though Lowe had a history of mocking Bowie, having called his 1977 EP Bowi (in retaliation for Bowie chopping the “e” off Low), Lowe allegedly had never heard “Breaking Glass” until Elvis Costello, listening to playback of Lowe’s track, said: “haven’t you lifted a Bowie title?”

Top: Martin Pulaski, “Laura in Brussels,” 1976.

What In the World

What In the World.
What In the World (Musikladen, 1978).
What In the World (live, 1978).
What In the World (rehearsal with Stevie Ray Vaughan, 1983).
What In the World (live, 1983).
What In the World (live, 1995).
What In the World (live, 2002).

“What In the World” was originally intended for The Idiot: it seems crafted for Iggy Pop’s voice (Pop’s audible on the track, especially on the second verse’s hollered “wait until the crowd goes!”), while its first line, “you’re just a little girl with grey eyes,” hints that the song is another in the Idiot‘s gallery of vulnerable, destructive women (“China Girl,” “Baby,” “Tiny Girls”).

But suddenly we’re in stranger territory. Bowie breaks off the seduction, veering into harsh, bizarre commands (“never mind—say something! wait until the crowd cries!”); there’s a shift in perspective, so the singer could just as easily be shouting down the mirror (the song originally was titled “Isolation”). A chorus appears, or more like a string of half-assembled choruses looped together. Bowie’s tone lurches from sympathy to numbness, sometimes in the course of single line—he seems to be revising thoughts as he speaks them. So the rising melody in the chorus (“something deep inside of me”) runs aground against the title phrase, which Bowie sings flatly, drawing the blood out of the song. When he changes “you” to “I,” in the second chorus, it’s even more disruptive: the long, biting vowel sound hobbles the melody.

“What in the World” is a series of rapid concussions: the first verse is over and done in 15 seconds, the first chorus in 20, and if not for its lengthy (by Low Side A standards) outro the song would run its course in a minute and a half. Yet “World” doesn’t feel brief, but seems to deepen and expand as it proceeds, disclosing new surfaces each time it’s played. Tony Visconti’s mix is as wearying to listen to as it’s invigorating—nothing is foregrounded, nothing is central, everyone seems to be fighting for space. (There’s a taste of Sparks in all this—Visconti had produced their Indiscretion the year before). As with most of the Low tracks, there’s the sense Bowie’s vocal just as easily could have been wiped.

The players zoom in and out of focus. There’s Ricky Gardiner’s jittery lead guitar, its brittle sound in part owed to Gardiner playing through a small, tinny Fender amp—he hadn’t wanted to bring his expensive amp on the plane. He gets a four-bar guitar solo, but then continues on in the left channel, as if unaware that another verse has started. Carlos Alomar’s rhythm guitar, dryly recorded and mixed low in the right channel, offers the song’s constantly-changing building blocks (each bar of the verse shifts from F to E-flat, while the chorus is a series of shifts, stabilizing on eight bars of stepwise back-and-forths from D to C.) Dennis Davis’ crashing, Harmonized drums are as much a lead presence as Bowie’s vocal (“World” is the second of three sequenced tracks on Low that a Davis drum fill kicks off) while George Murray’s steady bass playing makes him seem like the only sane man in the room. Roy Young’s Farfisa organ shows up in the second chorus, like a late party guest, while Brian Eno plays the joker in the pack, his regular role on Low—here Eno’s EMS Synthi One suitcase synthesizer churns out bubbling noises that saturate the first verse and seem intended to throw off any sense of rhythmic stability.

Low is also, as we’ll see, a record of Bowie grappling with writer’s block, to the point where getting a single line down was painful, and in “World” Bowie’s typically short and uncluttered lyric seems pieced together out of older songs: “I’m In the Mood For Love,” the Doors’ “You’re Lost Little Girl,” Syd Barrett’s (covering James Joyce)”Golden Hair” (possibly the inspiration for “talking through the gloom”), the Who’s “The Real Me,” the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love.” In the latter song, Keith Relf sang the title phrase with an emphasis on the last word, the previous two used as propulsion to launch the last into the air (“foryour LOVE!”). In “World,” Bowie places equal weight on each word, as if he’s singing phonetically and has no idea, or no care, what relevance each word has: “FOR–YOUR–LOVE”.

“World” is love song as interrogation, an isolate’s attempt to connect with another isolate (the girl’s “deep in your room” here, Bowie’s stuck in his room in the following song, “Sound and Vision”): it gives the listener as little concession as its singer gives the girl with grey eyes, who very well may not exist at all.

Recorded September 1976, primarily at Château d’Hérouville. The song must have wronged Bowie in some way, as he gave it a reggae arrangement on stage in 1978 and 1983. Revived in later tours.

Top: Patti Smith at the Boarding House, San Francisco, 1976.