Blue Blue Electric Blue

David Bowie : Sound and Vision

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Pretty amazing week in 1977: the release of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Television's Marquee Moon and David Bowie's "Sound and Vision", all in the span of seven days. Recorded at Château d'Hérouville in September of 1976, the song had a happy vibe, punctuated by producer Tony Visconti's wife, Mary Hopkin's doo-doo-doo-doo-doo vocals. But when it came time to write the lyrics, Bowie's mind went back to his lost, drug fueled time in California.

"Sound and Vision was the "ultimate retreat song", as Bowie would put it. "It was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows."

The intro of "Sound and Vision" is nearly longer than the rest of the song, creating anticipation every time you hear it.  Finally, nearly 90 seconds in, Bowie croons from his lowest register : 

Don't you wonder sometimes
'Bout sound and vision

Blue, blue, electric blue
That's the color of my room
Where I will live Blue, blue
Pale blinds drawn all day
Nothing to do, nothing to say
Blue, blue
 I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision

And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision
Drifting into my solitude, over my head
Don't you wonder sometimes
'Bout sound and vision

A Top 3 hit in the UK, "Sound and Vision"  was also a top ten hit in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. However, it stalled at No. 87 in Canada and only managed No. 69 in the United States.

Another Green Ziggy

David Bowie : What In The World

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I had planned to write quite a bit about the first of David Bowie's 1977 albums, Low. But my son really wanted to go to a Monster Truck rally and here we are approaching my bedtime after a long week. So here goes nothing.

It's a bi-polar effort though isn't it? The first side experimental chock full of avant garde rock n roll. And like the Beach Boys albums of the early 70's, most recordings fade out the moment the ideas run out. The second side reflecting the influence of his collaborator, Brian Eno.

“I knew he liked Another Green World a lot,” Eno told The Guardian’s Michael Watts in 1999. “And he must have realized that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become more friendly with them.”

Side Two was dismissed by Rolling Stone critic John Milward for its "dabbling" : 

Such technosheen music requires a detached master to hold the reins, and Bowie, the cracked actor, is just too much of a ham. The problem is most glaring when his Latin-mass voices are blended into the lunar mix with the subtlety of ripe blue cheese. ( A reference to "Warszawa").

 Bowie lacks the self-assured humor to pull off his avant-garde aspirations. His role playing long ago blew his detached mystique. Low serves as a moderately interesting conduit through which a wider audience will be exposed to Bowie's latest heroes, and in this sense is an interesting addition to his recorded catalog. More importantly, Low fulfills another of Bowie's requirements -- it again washes clean his audience's expectations and allows him to contemplate his next mask.

The dean, Robert Christgau, gave Low a B+.

I find side one's seven "fragments" -- since the two that clock in at less than 2:45 are 1:42 and 2:20, the term must refer to structure rather than length -- almost as powerful as the "overlong" tracks on Station to Station. "Such a wonderful person/But you got problems" is definitely a love lyric for our time. But most of the movie music on side two is so far from hypnotic that I figure Bowie, rather than Eno, must deserve credit for it. I mean, is Eno really completely fascinated by banality? 

As for Billboard Magazine, mostly read by retailers and radio programmers :

Bowie the multi-instrument master emerges on this disk. The emphasis is on eerie, unusual arrangements for well defined, laid-out instrumental journeys into some brooding, mysterious lands. Bowie's singing is significantly down-played here in favor of the overdubbed instruments including synthesizers and other keyboards. 

Side two is the most adventurous and a stark contrast to the few distorted hard rock cuts on side one. This LP emphasizes Bowie's serious writing efforts which only time can tell will appeal to the people who have watched him go through various musical phases. Best cuts: "Warszawa," "Weeping Wall," "Sound And Vision."

40 Year Itch : Bowie in Berlin

David Bowie : Always Crashing in the Same Car

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In September 1976, David Bowie moved to Berlin where he worked with Iggy Pop on the mixing of Pop's comeback album, The Idiot,  and finished recording the album Low with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti.
Why Berlin?
 "I went to Berlin to find an environment unlike California, that dreadful, parasitic mire," said Bowie. "It seemed foreign and alien to anything I'd been through. Rough and tough, not the sweet life".

 The sweet life had taken its toll on Bowie.
One of the songs he would record for Low is called "Always Crashing in the Same Car". Bowie had come up with a public story behind the song, something about racing around in an underground parking garage, going faster and faster.
"As I was getting up to 40 and 50, going around the corners, I remember looking at the dash thinking 'Jesus! Aren't I going to crash soon?'".
 There is another story in which he claimed to have been recklessly chasing a drug dealer through the streets of Hollywood.

Jasmine, I saw you peeping
As I pushed my foot down to the floor
I was going 'round and 'round
The hotel garage
Must have been touching close to 94
Oh, but I'm Always crashing in the same car

This is most likely a metaphor for a cocaine addict who realized he was repeating the same self-destructive patterns over and over again in his life.
That would not be the case artistically.
Bowie appreciated the ambient sounds of Brian Eno's Discreet Music and Another Green World. Together they forged Eno's minimalist approaches with Krautrock sensibilities. Low would be one of the most intriguing albums of 1977, a year we will explore in 2017.
God willing.