By 1976, David Bowie was one of the most famous people on earth and one of the most endangered. The Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane personas had made him a global phenomenon. Diamond Dogs had produced a theatrical tour so massive it nearly bankrupted him. The Young Americans album had given him his first American number one. And through all of it, running underneath the creative triumphs like a current of pure destruction, was a cocaine addiction so severe that Bowie would later say he has no clear memory of recording Station to Station in 1975 — despite it being widely considered one of his finest records.
Los Angeles was the problem and the place. Bowie described the city as “the most vile piss-pot in the world” and himself within it as “a hollow, empty figure… a thin white duke.” He was reportedly living on red peppers, milk, and cocaine. He became obsessed with black magic and Aleister Crowley. He asked engineers to draw pentagrams on the floor of the recording studio. He believed a witch was stealing his bodily fluids. His then-wife Angela Bowie found him living in a house he had covered in occult symbols, terrified to leave.
He left. In 1976, he moved to West Berlin with Iggy Pop — another man in desperate need of a quieter environment — and began what became the most celebrated creative chapter of his career. The Berlin Trilogy: Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979), all made in collaboration with producer Brian Eno at Hansa Studios, a building that looked out over the Berlin Wall.
Heroes is the peak. Recorded with guitarist Robert Fripp, who played his guitar parts from across a large room, the feed into the mixing desk controlled by Brian Eno to create the album’s signature sound of swelling, almost-orchestral guitar, the album is both spare and immense. The title track was written about a couple Bowie observed kissing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall from the studio window. He has since said they were, in fact, his producer Tony Visconti and a backing singer — a detail that makes the song more human without making it smaller.
“Heroes” — with its promise that even for just one day, we can be heroes — was not a political statement. It was a survival statement. A man who was not sure he was going to be alive in two years telling himself that there were things worth being. The wall outside the window gave the metaphor weight. The music gave it permanence.
Low is the more experimental of the two — its second side is entirely instrumental, ambient music influenced by Eno’s work with Tangerine Dream and the Krautrock movement. “Sound and Vision” became one of Bowie’s signature songs despite being a meditation on creative paralysis, on sitting in a blue room waiting for something to arrive. The irony — that the song about creative emptiness became a defining creative statement — is very Bowie.
He said Berlin saved his life. The music it produced may be the reason that claim doesn’t seem like an exaggeration. Bowie lived another forty years after Berlin. He made more great records, had more reinventions, and died in 2016 two days after releasing Blackstar — an album he made knowing he was dying, as a final gift to his audience.
But somewhere in that thin white figure looking out at the Berlin Wall, deciding to be a hero, something came back that the cocaine had nearly taken for good.