Station to Station

David Bowie was so deep into cocaine addiction during the recording of Station to Station that he later claimed no memory of making the album. He was surviving on milk and red peppers, living in a Los Angeles mansion he’d filled with occult objects, barely sleeping, channeling a character he called the Thin White Duke — emotionally cold, aristocratic, European, as far from Ziggy Stardust’s warmth as possible. The album is extraordinary. The title track opens it with ten minutes that sound like nothing else in Bowie’s catalog.

The first minute and fifteen seconds is pure sound design — flanged noise that resembles a locomotive approaching, building from near-silence to an enveloping roar before the first musical element enters. It is disorienting and deliberate. Bowie was absorbing Neu!, Kraftwerk, and the other German electronic acts that would become the foundation of his Berlin trilogy, and the title track’s opening shows that influence arriving in real time.

A slow, hypnotic march enters after the noise section — Carlos Alomar’s guitar, George Murray’s bass, Dennis Davis’s drums locked into a groove that is simultaneously mechanical and deeply funky. Bowie’s vocal, when it arrives, is controlled to the point of coldness. The Thin White Duke is performing detachment and almost achieving it. Almost.

“The return of the Thin White Duke / Making sure white stains.”

The key change at the five-minute mark — from the brooding minor of the opening sections into an exhilarating major-key disco-prog groove — is one of Bowie’s most dramatic structural moves. The song doubles in energy without increasing its tempo. Roy Bittan’s piano floods in. The arrangement becomes almost joyful, which is the correct word for what cocaine joy sounds like: relentless, slightly unhinged, brilliant, unsustainable.

Bowie fled Los Angeles immediately after the album. He went to Berlin. What he made there is what he’s remembered for. But “Station to Station” is what got him out.