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 Buy it! (EMI Remaster) |
Bonus tracks on RykoDisc release
Bonus tracks live from Station To Station tour, recorded 3/23/76 at Nassau Coliseum, Long Island.
 An ad which originally appeared in Creem magazine Contributed by Halldor |
| Country | Date | Peak # | # of weeks |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK | February 7, 1976 | 5 | 16 |
| US | ? | 3 | 32 |
| UK | May 4, 1991 | 57 | 1 |
Without doubt, Station to Station ranks among David's best albums. Transitional like most of his work in the 1970s, it turned out to be a precursor for the "Berlin Sound" inspired by Kraftwerk & Brian Eno.
Sounding as cool and fresh today as it did fifteen years ago, it was recently elected "best Bowie 1970s LP" by Rolling Stone. No one would have anticipated it in 1975, Bowie needed two months to finish the five original songs in the studio - once recording ran from seven in the morning to nine the following morning! David had entered the studio with only two songs, still unsure of the direction he wanted to go. Amazingly, his diet on amphetamine & other drugs (sometimes he stayed up for four days without sleep), his bizarre private life and, most important, the filming of Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth starring Bowie as an alien from outer space "who fell in love and became an alcoholic" provided him with the inspiration for the album.
Gradually, he began to adopt a new persona, the Thin White Duke. This cold New European, forever restless, introduces the whole album on the title song. Station to Station is about the strains of the three-day train journey from New York to Los Angeles - all condensed into ten minutes of music. It begins with the sound of a train moving from speaker to speaker and ends as an all-out rocker. "It's not the side effects of the cocaine - I'm thinking that it must be love", he tells us. Only the song's coldness and desperation prevents it from being as commercial as, say, Modern Love from his 1983 Let's Dance album. The next song, Golden Years, was the album's only hit single. A melodic but restrained disco song with strong lyrics, it became the follow-up to to his US chart-topping song Fame. Legend has it that Bowie originally wrote the song for Elvis Presley, he reportedly rejected it. Word On A Wing on the other hand, is a ballad about Bowie's restless searching - this time for God. Perhaps inspired by The Man Who Fell To Earth, refuge is found in the Lord and prayer. The song is literally heavenly with is choir-of-angels effect.
The B-side begins with TVC 15, a bizarre, raunchy song inspired by a (supposedly drug-inspired) story Iggy Pop told Bowie - about how Iggy's girlfriend was swallowed by his TV set! Earl Slick's guitar noises in the background and Roy Bittan's (of Springsteen's E-Street Band) piano make this song a good one, although it bombed when released as a single. Stay is a smooth effort from the master. Running breathless on a funk groove, it continues on the "it's too late..." theme ("Stay . . . or do something..."). Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick get a chance to reveal their talent in the final (instrumental) two minutes of the song. Wild Is The Wind is a cover of a song written for a 1957 western starring Anna Magnani. The romantic mood of the song seems to have inspired Bowie, his singing is brittle and vulnerable. Claiming he was "a sucker for a romantic song", he later released it as a single in 1981 as a trailer for the CHANGESTWOBOWIE compilation album.
