My Month of Bowie, day 10: 'Station to Station' (1976)

David Bowie hears that train a-comin'.

The album: Station to Station (RCA, 1976)

Bowie was going places in '76.

My thoughts: In the 1970s, David Bowie was as reliable as a car company. Every year, like General Motors or Ford, he'd release his new product line. Sometimes, it would be a total, dramatic overhaul; other times, it would be a tasteful refinement of what had come before. But it would all have that distinctive David Bowie stamp on it, as recognizable as a Chevrolet emblem. "Come on down and see the '76 Bowies! Drive one home today!"

What makes this so improbable is that David Bowie, the human being, was an utter mess in the 1970s. His tenth album, Station to Station, was made at a particularly fraught time when he was dealing with substance abuse and mental health issues. The title even reflects his uncertain, itinerant lifestyle. Station to Station should sound like a mental breakdown captured on vinyl, about as "accessible" as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (1975). But it doesn't. The lyrics hint, obliquely as usual, at the turmoil in Bowie's life. But the music sounds confident, assured, and even playful. 

How do I account for this? Well, either his collaborators knew how to keep him on track (pun intended) or Bowie himself was able to get his act together just long enough to record an LP. Then, once a new collection of songs was in the can, he'd let himself fall apart again. However he managed to do it, I'm glad he did because Station to Station is another corker—not a direct sequel to Young Americans, necessarily, but not a complete rejection of it either. Again, it's more like a refinement of an existing product line. This is state-of-the-art Bowie in the year of our Lord 1976.

Listening to Station to Station jostled loose some memories, because it contains a couple of songs I remembered hearing as a teenager, namely the epic title track and the New Orleans-inflected "TVC 15." As I was listening to the latter, with its celebratory, Professor Longhair-style piano, I realized that I had no idea what the song was about. So I looked into it. According to the internet: "This song was reportedly inspired by Iggy Pop’s drug induced hallucination that the television set, in Bowie’s LA home, had swallowed his girlfriend." See, that's what I'm talking about. Bowie's life was beyond crazy in 1976, but it (somehow) didn't result in difficult, discordant music.

One more thought I had while listening to this record: Bowie, like all musicians, is the product of his influences. I can hear traces of Chuck Berry, Lou Reed, and Jacques Brel in the grooves of Station to Station. I also detect the influence of '70s funk musicians like James Brown and Jimmy Castor. But I can hear how Bowie himself inspired the musicians who came after him. In particular, I'm guessing that this LP hit David Byrne of Talking Heads pretty hard. How appropriate that Byrne later inducted Bowie into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

This is a very exciting juncture in the project because I'm about to dive into Bowie's famed "Berlin trilogy." I've heard good things.

Next: Low (1977)