When rock stars do too much cocaine, they tend to do ridiculous things, like drive cars into motel swimming pools, or hire hit men to snuff out their bassist, or make Be Here Now. David Bowie, on the other hand, produced Station to Station, an album he allegedly doesn't remember making, but which, ironically, stands as his most immaculately constructed album, and the most important tactical transition in a career built upon aesthetic reinvention.
Arriving in the wake of 1975's glam-rock-shunning, Philly-soul-fetishizing Young Americans, Station to Station offered proof that Bowie's fascination with American funk and disco was no one-off lark. But if Young Americans often felt like a studied genre exercise, Station to Station filtered that rhythmic influence through some of Bowie's other obsessions at the time: the austere Krautrock of Neu! and Kraftwerk, the occult, Nazism, and, yes, a whole lotta blow. And yet, for all the tales of late-night black-majick ceremonies and Hitler-salute scandals that surrounded its release, perhaps the most bizarre thing about Station to Station is that an album of such sinister orgin would turn out to be Bowie's highest charting album ever in the U.S., peaking at No. 3.
By the mid-70s, it was customary for pop stars to sing of their disillusionment with fame (see: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Neil Young's On the Beach) but they usually did so in an insular, introspective fashion, after they had gained some distance from the storm. By contrast, Station to Station finds Bowie expressing his weariness while the party was still rages on around him; even in the midst of his "Golden Years", he's yearning to "run for the shadows." In essence, the album is a cry for help from the champagne room: On the hymn-like piano-ballad "Word on a Wing", the career chameleon decries this "age of grand illusion" (tellingly, this LP's Thin White Duke persona would be the last character Bowie introduced), while the title track's momentous prog-disco suite-- with references to Aleister Crowley and Kabbalism-- charts a course from spiritual void toward ecstatic religious reawakening. "It's not the side effects of the cocaine," Bowie declares as the song hits its funky, 4/4 stride, "I'm thinking that it must be love." Rarely have delusions been rendered with such grandeur.
This repackaged 3xCD Station to Station arrives as part of an ongoing campaign of deluxe Bowie reissues, and this one's primary selling point-- a remastered version cut from the original analog tapes-- should pique the interest of more than just ardent audiophiles. For all its futurist intimations, Station to Station's most integral elements are acoustic-- E Street Band member Roy Bittan's luxuriant piano rolls, drummer Dennis Davis' dexterous grooves, and Bowie's sax-squawking, which meld to glorious, otherworldly effect on "TVC15". The new master perfectly mediates between the album's surface elegance and underlying menace.
And in lieu of any studio outtakes or rarities, we get a complete, two-disc version of Bowie's famed March '76 Nassau Coliseum concert, a long-time bootleg that also provided bonus-track fodder for Rykodisc's 1991 Station to Station issue. The need for another mid-70s Bowie live album may seem minimal given the relatively recent reissues of David Live (1974) and Stage (1978), but the Nassau concert is a rousing document of the Station to Station-era line-up (with Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye subbing in for Bittan and Stacey Hayden in the place of Earl Slick) eagerly applying its slick, polyrhythmic panache to glam-rock warhorses like "Suffragette City" and "Panic in Detroit", and compacting "Life on Mars?" and "Five Years" into Broadway-scaled medleys. In retrospect, the Nassau show represents something of a last lap around the arena for Bowie as the show-stopping, populist entertainer, before he laid his early-70s material to rest for a while and delved into the more experimental terrain of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger. To paraphrase another enigmatic pop icon who had a conflicted relationship with stardom: first he took Long Island, then he took Berlin.