🫀David Bowie's Low and Holding onto Success as a Way to Outrun the Past
Growing up and trying to get free
They didn’t want me to go to New York. My mother especially.
She was absolutely sure it wouldn’t work out — not because she didn’t believe in me, but because she hadn’t believed in herself for so long and the world had so often proven itself an unforgiving place. I left in March of 2010 and she barely spoke to me in the months before — maybe because she was afraid for me, but I think mostly because she was afraid for herself. I had been her bridge to the outside world for 28 years and it must have been terrifying to think of losing me to a place she found so violent and unholy.
I had to go because I couldn’t bear the weight any more and I was sure that if I could just get there, I could prove to her that we I would be OK. That what I wanted for myself wasn’t so bad as she imagined. I had to go because everything about Atlanta asked me to become someone she could like better and it was getting hard to breathe.
I got a part-time design job and two roomates in a basement apartment between the pages of Williamsburg and Bushwick. Every morning when I took the train from the corner of Powers Street, I crammed Low on repeat into my little white earbuds. Smiling through the gloom made sense to me, standing on the edge of the yellow line and waiting for the distorted, punching guitars in Speed of Life to shove me into the L train; the bending synth rushing all us freaks through the under-river blackness. I had my back was against the wall but the world was gaping in front of me.
Bowie had been on a three-year cocaine bender when he and Iggy Pop arrived in West Berlin to make Low.
He was barely 29 and had released ten chart-topping albums in nine years, the last of which (Station to Station) he didn’t remember recording because he’d been too high. Iggy had been living out of an abandoned garage and was so addicted to heroin that no one would work with him anymore. David the most famous he’d ever been … but almost flat broke. His manager had used David’s share of profits to fund his management company — almost everything David earned had been spent on staff salaries, running costs and touring expenses. Bowie had made millions and barely seen a penny.
He was in good company — everyone was scraping it together in 1976. The war in Vietnam and the oil embargo lurched a booming economy into crisis. You couldn’t fill up your car, get a job, or pay for your groceries. Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years prior, but not before telling America that what ailed us was the moral failure of looking out for the each other instead of looking out for number one.
“Let us remember that America was built not by government, but by people — not by welfare, but by work — not by shirking responsibility, but by seeking responsibility.” He said, in his second inaugural address.
The shadows of Watergate and the trauma of Vietnam permanently stained government and we turned to business to solve our problems instead. Personal liberty and rebellion against the man meant long hair, sex outside of marriage and redefining the pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of personal capital.
While the world reshuffled, Bowie stripped away his excess. All that coke had given him psychosis and he wasn’t sure he could make music anymore. His friends said he barely spoke during the recording, just played and mixed, stopped and started. Feeling for home in a recording studio a few yards from the Berlin wall.
There are no characters on Low — no spiders from mars, no thin white ubermench. Just David and his thoughts, alone in a room. The albums before search for a stage — Low is private. There is an intimacy and an introspection that fries a little in waves of distorted harmonica. The lyrics wander and trample to a bouncy pop beat without ever quite finishing a thought. There was nothing better for me, dog paddling around Brooklyn looking for a place that sold more than one roll of toilet paper in a pack.
Leaving Georgia was my first real rebellion. My mother refused to initiate phone calls with me for years after I left and when I called them, she cut the replies short so I would know how badly I’d betrayed her. My Dad moved out at the start of that first summer but I didn’t find out until I called on their anniversary a few months later. It’s not like our system was broken in a really dramatic, nasty way — it was just small and confining, and with me gone it had come unglued.
Gravity kicks in once you realize you can’t go home anymore. Anything could tip on the scale on whether I’d make it, so while the Occupy protesters piled into Tompkins Square Park, I wrapped my arms around capitalism and grabbed at every job, every boss, every project to hold tight to my independence.
David was good company — another suburban kid who wasn’t satisfied with a good life in a tight box, hell bent on working until the world told us we were enough.
ICYMI
🌞 Summer Guide: Links & recs for sacred days
The hardest thing about summer is knowing how quickly it goes. Around now, at the top of June, the trees have become so full of green that they jostle each other for space in the breeze. School will be out in two weeks here in New York and the kids are vibrating with of anticipatory freedom.
Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has a New York story and I enjoyed reading yours. Love this line in particular: "...so while the Occupy protesters piled into Tompkins Square Park, I wrapped my arms around capitalism and grabbed at every job, every boss, every project to hold tight to my independence."
Ok, have you ever heard the David Bowie song The Laughing Gnome. My youngest is obsessed with it. It is ridiculous and punny and if you listen to it you will never get it out of your head, but I think your son's reaction will be worth it.