Bowie's Low Thirty Years On

Thirty years ago if you would have walked into any record store you might have seen a certain album called LOW gathering dust on the new release racks. You might have been struck by the striking cover photo and taken an open copy into a listening booth. Dropping the needle on random spots you would have heard something remarkably different and daring; from the deliberately chopping short splintered songs on the first side to the long instrumentals on side two. It would have been unlike anything else you had ever heard and thirty years after its release LOW remains a unique and audacious creation.
David Bowie released LOW just after his birthday in January of 1977. Initial reactions to the album were lukewarm to say the least. Critics were pretty condemning and fans were perplexed. After initial solid sales it quickly fell off the charts and became one of Bowie's poorest selling albums.
It soon became apparent that LOW was something remarkable and within just a few years its effects began to be felt in a wide variety of artistic fields. Bands like Joy Division among a slew of others would take it's chilly sound to more extreme levels. Pretty much the entire post punk movement was built on LOW.
The creation of LOW remains a misunderstood one. Often credited as being recorded completely in Berlin with Brian Eno in the producer's chair, LOW was actually recorded in France with Tony Visconti producing. Visconti remains one of the seventies most unheralded visionaries and he is deserving of major credit for LOW'S revolutionary sound. More mysterious is the album's connection to Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.
Much of LOW'S side two was originally written for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH's soundtrack but Roeg had never intended to use Bowie as composer. What exactly was recorded for the soundtrack and just how it sounded is debatable. A mysterious bootleg appeared in the seventies called THE VISITOR which purportedly claimed to be the original recordings but it is now said to be locked in the private vault of a certain Thomas Jerome Newton.
While Brian Eno did not produce LOW his contributions are immeasurable. He shared Bowie's love for the music of bands ranging from NEU!, CAN, POPOL VUH and KRAFTWERK and LOW helped turn an entire generation on to these remarkable German groups.
It remains an album that has spiritually affected many people, including myself and as Brian Eno said an album, 'that many people built an entire career from'.

The thing that we know of as 'the album' is slipping away from us, it is becoming something unrecognizable. LOW is a perfect reminder of just how powerful two sides and less than forty minutes of music can be. I have many albums I love but LOW is the one I would reach for to put on the turntable if I knew the world was coming to an end. Our downloaded culture needs reminding of its spiritually charged grooves more than ever and throughout this year I will be paying tribute to it.

Life Rotates In 45 Revolutions Per Minute (David Bowie: "Drive In Saturday" with "Round and Round")

"Not only is it arguably the finest track on ALADDIN SANE, "Drive In Saturday" is also the great forgotten Bowie single...(it is) one of Bowie's most underrated classics."
--Nicholas Pegg, THE COMPLETE DAVID BOWIE-

"When the chorus came around there it was again, "Twig the wonder kid", and I thought, blimey.  I remember being absolutely bowled over and of course I rushed out and bought it." 
-Twiggy-

David Bowie's overwhelming run of great albums in the seventies often overshadows the fact that he was also one of the great Singles artists of the period as well. While many of his 45s can be counted among his greatest works, one for me stands above the rest as not only the best of Bowie's career, but as one of the greatest songs in rock history.
1973's "Drive In Saturday" was originally written for Mott The Hoople, who were coming off a sizable hit with Bowie's "All The Young Dudes". Thinking it was a bad idea to follow up that smash with another Bowie cover Mott turned the track down. Bowie would later admit that he was justifiably confused by the decision and said that, "I never understood that because I always thought that would have been a great single for them."
Bowie decided to put out the song himself and in April of 1973 the single was released a week before the masterful album it graced, ALADDIN SANE.
Written while Bowie was touring America promoting ZIGGY STARDUST, "Drive In Saturday" is a song about a future where people have become so isolated from each other that they have to look at images from the past to remember how to make love. The track manages to simultaneously be rooted in the rock from the fifties that Bowie had grown up with and yet still sound slightly futuristic and totally progressive.
The song features some of the most evocative and emotionally devastating lyrics that Bowie has ever written with its nostalgic nods to Mick Jagger, Twiggy and an idealistic sixties very much lost.

Backed by the Spiders from Mars and featuring some of the most impressive guitar work that the incomparable Mick Ronson ever delivered, "Drive In Saturday" is one of the definitive glam rock tracks. Perhaps only Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain" tops it as one of the most perfectly crafted song of the early seventies, with Bowie's altogether haunting synthesizer and saxophone playing adding to Ronson's extraordinary arrangement. Featuring the always crisp and incredibly layered Tony Visconti production,"Drive In Saturday"  plays perfectly as a stand alone single and an essential album track. ALADDIN SANE would be unthinkable without the song and it helps give the album an emotional pull that, to my ears at least, makes it the greatest Bowie album of the period and possibly the greatest Glam album ever.
Much like Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, a film Bowie would star in a year later, there is something extremely prophetic about"Drive In Saturday". It seems to not only anticipate the Internet but also our increasingly closed off and isolated world. As more and more people live their lives with only their cell phone and social media as their only real sources of communication, Bowie's futuristic cold and emotionally cut off world might be much closer than just around the corner...in fact, it might already be here.

I first heard DRIVE IN SATURDAY as a teenager and I must admit that it wasn't one of my favorites at first. It wasn't until I heard him do it live in the late nineties on his HOURS tour that the song really hit me. Backed by the lovely and talented Holly Palmer, a singer whose voice melded in perfectly with Bowie's, his HOURS tour versions are majestic sounding and at times nearly top the original single. With over thirty years of loving Bowie under my belt, "Drive In Saturday" has become one of my favorite tracks by him and truth be told one of my favorite songs of all time.

The b-side for "Drive In Saturday" is an exciting cover of Chuck Berry's "Round And Round". Originally recorded for the ZIGGY STARDUST record, "Round and Round" is a gloriously sloppy Spiders From Mars run through of a track from Bowie's youth. While not one of Bowie's greatest covers or B-sides, it does seem a fun and perfect companion for the moving and nostalgic"Drive In Saturday" .

"Drive In Saturday" has been covered by several acts over the years with the most notable being probably Morrissey's powerful live stabs at it. The song still remains a bit hidden as one of Bowie's great works, with other masterful singles like "Life On Mars garnering most of the attention. To me it is the equal of anything Bowie has ever recorded and one of the emotionally devastating songs I have ever heard with the line, "She'd sigh like Twig the wonder kid" never failing to tear me up. Twiggy, "Twig the wonder kid herself", would appear on the cover of Bowie's next album (PIN-UPS) and she still speaks of how overwhelmed she was the first time she heard DRIVE IN SATURDAY. While the song only managed to make it to number three on the charts and has been forgotten by many, I suspect that for myself, Twig the wonder kid and for more than a few others, the track will always remain an overwhelmingly important and special one.