Recording at Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles

Interviews with Harry Maslin and Earl Slick extracted from "The Return Of The Thin White Duke" by Richard Cromelin, Circus magazine, March 1976:

Harry Maslin, who succeeded Tony Visconti as co-producer of Young Americans and returned for Station To Station: "There was no specific sound in mind. I don't think he had any specific direction as far as whether it should be R&B, or more English-sounding, or more commercial or less commercial. I think he went out more to make a record this time than to worry about what it was going to turn out to be."

Earl Slick (guitar): "Young Americans was more cut and dried," Slick observes. "It was just what he wanted and that was that." Maslin adds: "I think basically he was trying to make a commercial album.... He wanted to expand his acceptance, so he tried a little more Americanised direction."

That commercial challenge met, Bowie was free to take a more spontaneous tack when he went into Hollywood's Cherokee Studio with Young Americans veterans Slick, Carlos Alomar (guitar), and Dennis Davis (drums), along with new bassman George Murray and Bruce Springsteen's pianist Roy Bittan. Actually, "spontaneous" hardly says it.

Slick: "He had one or two songs written but they were changed so drastically that you wouldn't know them from the first time anyway, so he basically wrote everything in the studio."

Maslin: "To understand the way David works is to know that you can't understand the way David works. He's always changing things, just changing completely, so it's hard to tell at times what he's talking about. Right before the mixing we would change the lyrics of a song."

Station To Station

The title song's 10:08 time (it's the longest cut Bowie's ever issued), the depth of its complex textures, and its segmented structure qualify it as the album's most formidable challenge. "Yeah," laughs Slick, shaking his head slowly at the memory, "especially when he walks in and says 'I've got this new song that I haven't written yet'." Maslin says that, in effect, Station to Station is two songs in one, and that a "total environment" was the sonic goal.

"Bizarre" is Slick's prompt evaluation of the cacophonous opening. "That's the only word I can think of. It makes sense I don't know why I'm saying that, but it makes sense to me." Its source was a train section off a sound-effects record, doctored by Maslin with equalisation and unconventional phasing methods. (He got a little help from Bowie: "David was really into it.... At times he was like a child playing with the sound.") Sombre piano chords set the tone while an insistent bass-drums-percussion pattern asserts itself beneath an urban-chaos miasma of sound beeps, hideous grinding, menacing footsteps and some wailing guitar feedback generated by Bowie and Slick width enough force to blow out three of their Marshall amps. "We both played all the way through the song," says Slick, "and then Harry took part of David's and part of mine and stuck them all together."

Slick: "The tracks went down pretty fast once we learned them."

Maslin: "It's an advantage to go in fresh like that, without rehearsals. The band isn't stale on a song."

Bowie relied quite a bit on the band's creativity and on Maslin's technical suggestions, but the basic directives resulted from David's instincts at the moment. Slick tries to describe the musical conference with Bowie that led to his commanding guitar performance on Stay but gives up with a shrug. "He explained what you hear. He doesn't say normal words. I've been wrong with him for two years and I know what he wants just by…" He can't find the phrase to complete the thought.

Golden Years

From start to finish, Golden Years is the purest descendant of the Young Americans sound, but even so the disco sound has been highly modified. It was one of the few songs the group rehearsed, the first they completed, and the one that immediately seemed right as the single pick. Maslin achieved the "round" quality of the backing voices by using an old, neglected RCA mike. (Similarly, he tried to utilise different microphones on Bowie's leads throughout the album to gain a variety in sound that would complement Bowie's stylistic diversity.)

Word On A Wing

Bowie refers to Word On A Wing as his hymn. Is he being facetious? How intentional are the religious connotations of the lyrics?

Maslin: "I don't know about Word on a Wing, to tell you the truth. I get different feelings from it. I love the song. It's just unexpected out of him."

The "you" that Bowie addresses in the song could well be a person (though an exceedingly rare one, a perfect lover who brings him nothing short of enlightenment). But the tremulous reverence of his low register singing, the celestial soprano voice at the end (not from an angel, but a Chamberlain, a sophisticated version of the Mellotron), and the nature of the language suggest a more lofty object:

Sweet name you're born once again for me…
Lord I kneel and offer you my word on a wing
And I'm trying hard to fit among your scheme of things...
Lord, Lord, my prayer flies like a word on the wing
I don't stand in my own light . . .
I'm alive in you."

Has the Chameleon Kid got religion?

Maslin: "That's what it sounds like to me too. I don't think he's into any specific kind of religion or philosophy. He's interested in them all, and mysticism, but I think David's too intelligent to try to follow one philosophy."

Slick: "Who knows what he's thinking at the time?"