< Monday Coffee Break: Anatomy Lesson | Main | The Current Road Trip: Duluth >

Win David Bowie's Station to Station 3-disc re-issue!

Posted at 10:45 AM on September 27, 2010 by Jim McGuinn
Filed under: Contests

With the exception of maybe Amy Winehouse, it's hard to think of a major artist today who made music under as much drug-fueled duress as David Bowie did in the mid-'70s. Claiming to have no recollection of even making the album, somehow Station to Station holds up as both a challenging and rewarding album that found Bowie in transition between the soul music of 1974's Young Americans and his earlier Ziggy-rock, and where he would head next with his 'Berlin Trilogy' experimental albums made with Iggy and Eno. Station to Station was also the vehicle for a new Bowie persona - the Thin White Duke.

From Wikipedia:

"At first glance, the Duke appeared more "normal" than Bowie's previous incarnations, wearing a stylish, cabaret-style wardrobe, but the massive amounts of cocaine the rock star allegedly consumed during this period made his personality, or at least the personality he displayed during interviews, more alarming than it had ever been. At this time in his life, he said that he lived on "red peppers, cocaine and milk".

Impeccably dressed in white shirt, black trousers and waistcoat, The Duke was a hollow man who sang songs of romance with an agonised intensity while feeling nothing, "ice masquerading as fire". The persona has been described as "a mad aristocrat", "an amoral zombie", and "an emotionless Aryan superman". For Bowie himself, The Duke was "a nasty character indeed", and later, "an ogre for me"

As his drug habit ate away at his physical and mental health, Bowie decided to move from Los Angeles to Paris and then West Berlin, where he began recording the groundbreaking Berlin Trilogy (Low, "Heroes", and Lodger) with Brian Eno."

Despite such ominous roots, the album is alive with innovation, as nascent disco and electronica melds wtih noisy guitar rock and some of Bowie's most obtuse lyrics and singing. The band, led by guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, is ferocious. When people talk about how much impact David Bowie has had on the evolution of rock and roll, it's records like Station to Station that illustrate it. This is one of those records that marked a place on a journey, and a fascinating stop at that.

All week we'll be digging into tracks on the air, including live cuts from the bonus discs - a March 1976 Nassau Coliseum show that is electrifying.

****Wednesday night at 10pm tune in to hear a special featuring studio and live tracks from the Station to Station re-issue*****

Fill out the entry form here to register to win one of 5 copies of the brand new 3-disc version of Station to Station we'll give away!

September 2010
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Master Archive