Usually, it is not considered one of Bowie’s masterpieces, but Station To Station recorded during a period when he was exhausted from work and drug use, now receiving new editions is a remarkable album worth knowing, one of the highlights of the Thin White Duke as a creator and performer. On the tenth anniversary of the pioneering musician’s death, we return to one of his greatest and forgotten moments.
A great example of an album that scores highly here is Bowie’s Station To Station, which will later this month receive new vinyl editions for his 50th birthday. And although it is usually not ranked among Bowie’s top five albums that one must own or at least listen to once in a lifetime, it is certainly a masterpiece worth exploring.
For Bowie, Sound and Vision was not just the name of a key song from his masterpiece Low. It was a holistic concept, and his look and sound changed every album or two, depending on the period. In the mid-1970s, Bowie was between two of the most talked-about and important periods in his career: between the early decade’s glam days of Ziggy Stardust and the Berlin period of the late decade. In fact, Bowie was then in two sub-periods: the short “plastic soul” days of the 1975 album Young Americans, where he collaborated with John Lennon on the song Fame, and the year when he performed under the nickname “Thin White Duke” and recorded Station To Station.
After abandoning glam rock, Bowie wanted to discover America, hoping it would discover him as well. The song Fame was successful, but Bowie’s full soul album from that year was met with mixed feelings. This did not stop him, and he moved on to his next project. By early 1976, Bowie was not just another successful rock star, but also a promising actor thanks to his role in the sci-fi film The Man Who Fell to Earth, tailored for him. Bowie also planned to record the film’s soundtrack, but eventually dropped it. He was exhausted from work and cocaine use, or vice versa. Despite all this, he presented in his tenth album one of his creative and performance peaks.
On paper, Station To Station did not enjoy optimal conditions to become a truly legendary album or a must-have item for those who want to know Bowie’s ever-changing face in depth. It is short (under 40 minutes, with the title track taking more than a quarter of the runtime). It sold decently at the time but did not produce a string of hits, and even its cover taken from a film frame and insisted by Bowie to be in black and white is considered less iconic than those that graced albums like Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane. These dry facts largely disappear the moment one listens to the six songs that make up the album.
Like the album’s title, Bowie in early 1976 moved between stations. One foot firmly stood in the Thin White Duke era, while the other hinted to listeners at the trilogy of albums Bowie would complete by the late, half-dark Berlin period. The title track opens with German Kraftwerk-like electronic influences and quotations from Nietzsche and Kabbalah (“From Kether to Malkuth”). After this stunning opening comes Golden Years, a major hit originally intended for Elvis Presley. But the king passed on it, and the Duke, and especially his fans, received one of Bowie’s brightest moments in the 1970s.
The album closes with a cover of Wild is the Wind, which became a classic through jazz singer Bowie met in his stay in Los Angeles, where the album was recorded. Bowie recorded covers before Wild is the Wind and continued to do so afterward, but if one must choose the cover where he delivered a canonical performance close to or almost surpassing the original, it is probably this song.
