July Record Club: David Bowie, "Station to Station"

Yay, Station to Station!!!  One of my favorite ablums of all time, and quite possibly my favorite album of the 70s.  Certainly my favorite Bowie album.  And maybe the best album ever made by a man who purportedly subsisted off of just peppers, milk, and cocaine during its recording, which process of recording he remembers almost nothing of.

Informal palaver:

My personal history with the record involves seeing it in a lot of people's collections, LP or CD, throughout the years. I've heard "Golden Years" since the 70s on rock radio. I own Station to Station, but added it to my hard drive no later than 5 years ago. As a work of automatic writing/drawing/composing - and I consider it such, since Bowie and most of the crew involved have no concrete memories of the recording other than how much cocaine was available to use - this has some indelible constructions/evocations of what "feelings" were moving through Los Angeles ca. 1975. Bowie's behavior around this period is "out there". Musings about power; citing Hitler as a rock star; and being deathly afraid of Jimmie Page as the result of some spirit war waged. I'd ask that, Post-Lupin, give us some reference to the use of the Sephiroth with respect to this record (particularly the reference in "Station to Station") - because the occult factors highly in this record and informs my usage of the phrase "automatic writing".

The introduction of The Thin White Duke is an odd one, but appears to preface the 80s culture. The origin of this character comes from Bowie's writing The Duke's panto-biography (a liberal portmanteau implying pantomime and biography) while filming The Man Who Fell to Earth. As homework for this month's Record Club, perhaps a viewing of the film is valuable. Then, again perhaps, comparing the earlier Nicholas Roeg film Performance in contrast as deeper research. Roeg had a track record of making provocative, disturbing films in the 70s.

The record of the record:

"Station to Station" - "Train kept a' rollin' all night long" is the reference I extract from the opening. Humorous self-awareness in refusing to believe cocaine is the cause; desire to believe that love lies below and arranges the feeling. I construe this from the lyric fragment, "It's not the side-effects of the cocaine. I'm thinking that it must be love." Killer feedback from Earl Slick.

"Golden Years" - Musically, this continues the Rhythm and Blues/Soul revision from Bowie. What started in Young Americans gets a little less smooth, a bit more ragged, but somehow a bit more rugged.

"Word on a Wing" - Ballad in a soul style. The guitar overdub bubbling deep in the mix. Lyrics appear to commemorate a sigil working. It's an offering in recollection.

"TVC-15" - TV Channel 15? Cryptic lyrics that, I think, can only be unpacked as description of occult mystical experience. For me, this track is the most fun on the record.

"Stay" - Funk song about dissipation. 

"Wild Is the Wind" - Nina Simone homage as filtered through plastic soul aesthetic that was morphing into the Berlin Years.

Cannot correctly post link via phone cuz duh-doy. Google "tvc-15 snl"

I love this album and listen to it often, but for a long time it was a big, noticeable gap in my Bowie knowdledge. Although my uncle’s a big Thin White Duke/Young Americans fan Bowie “going American” didn’t really appeal to late teens-early twenties me and I only became interested in seeking this out after hearing that it was a bridge between his soul-y stuff and Low (which blew my mind when I heard it in college—I was only familiar with Ziggy Stardust and Bowie’s singles, so I’d heard “Sound & Vision” before, but the whole thing just struck me as one of the best recordings ever immediately). And that’s how I listened to it for a while—you definitely hear a bit of Kraftwerk rolling in on the opening to “Station to Station”—but it’s really its own thing. Of course Low comes after it, but Station to Station isn’t really its predecessor.

I’m a big fan of “Word on a Wing” but I didn’t realize it was almost Christian until recently (I always thought of it as more of a striving for interpersonal connection, but that feeling obviously goes towards God as well—Rumi, Solomon, &c). Evidently Bowie was toying with Christianity in his coke-peppers-and-milk phase, to the point of wearing a crucifix for non-provacative reasons, but quickly realized it wasn’t for him. Can you imagine a Bowie who becomes a hardcore Christian? I can and it’s depressing, and Bowie evidently thought the same and was embarrassed by the song, taking it out of his concert repertoire for decades. That said if his experimentation with religion brought us that song it can’t have been all bad.

I respect Bowie's talent a lot, and the reasons people find to praise him, but can't say I've ever enjoyed him myself. I find him pretty ponderous and taxing much of the time. Apologies for another boring, negative opinion that I can't flesh out very well. I didn't mind the title track and "Word on a Wing", "TVC15" to a lesser extent, and didn't strongly dislike, but could have done without the others. I forgot I was listening by the end of "Stay", and I agree with ganews that the closer feels ill-placed. No accounting for taste.

Interested to learn from repulsionist's excellent description about the Kabbalah references, which I didn't notice before.

Bowie interview in Rolling Stone just after the album had released. It's a humdinger, filled with crazy good/crazy bad. Bowie willingly plays Harlequin in his Commedia dell'arte. Sometimes it catches up.

With respect to this album, I chose to interpret/critique from an occultist lens because Bowie himself opined that this record is, basically, a magickal treatise, and no critic at the time of the interview in 1996/1997 had observed such. [Cited from Legacy section of Wikipedia entry for Station to Station] I figured we should have a crack at the important work in that vein.

Kether to Malkuth reference from "Station to Station" likely alludes to "From Kingdom to Crown", implying the infinite, upper tiers of consciousness are temporarily managed by intellect. The movement from kingdom to crown, I believe, is the expression of art - changing the inspiration of the divine via intellectual skill into craft or techne. At the end of the stanza containing specific points of the Sephiroth, a curious mention of "white stains" pops up. Aleister Crowley wrote an collection of poems published under that title. Current and past lore appears to associate the reference in the song directly to Crowley. Even stranger is how the phrase is used. It's subject-verb, not adjective-noun. 

In closing, no small amount of weird woo shows up in this record. The preceding was what I had a strong interest in reading others' thoughts about.

I don't have other thoughts about it, but it's very interesting.

So, I can kinda riff on this one. Oh, I get it; "TVC 15" is a song about transvestite/transgender clones. *badum-tsh*

We have Joey Arias in red on the left. Bowie in center. And Klaus Nomi on the right. And, a robot pink poodle runaway from the Blade Runner set. There's an interesting article from OUT that describes what precipitated this future vision.

Roy Batty's Pet Dove and pantsgoblin....