“The best band in the world”: David Bowie’s favourite album by The Velvet Underground
In the 1970s, David Bowie reached the creative pinnacle of his career. As an introverted performer, he sought solace in different alter egos, from the space-bound Ziggy Stardust to the fascist cocaine addict The Thin White Duke. The latter character debuted in 1975 in the run-up to Station to Station, an album that heard Bowie at a creative peak yet an “all-time low” mentally.
Throughout the 1970s, before moving to Berlin with Iggy Pop, Bowie battled a spiralling cocaine addiction. The stimulant helped the performer face the masses on stage and yanked him out of bed and into the studio whenever he woke up after late nights of partying. During his nadir, Bowie sustained himself on red peppers, milk and hard drugs, a diet conducive to the White Duke’s stature.
After experimentation and a fair amount of cannabis in his youth, Bowie embraced hard drugs with voracity after laying roots in the US. “I started on the drugs at the end of 1973 and then with force in 1974,” he said in a 1993 Rolling Stone interview. “As soon as I got to America, pow! It was so freely available in those days. Coke was everywhere. Because I have a very addictive personality, I was a sucker for it.”
In retrospect, Bowie undoubtedly regretted the extent of his addictions. However, drugs and excess were so central to the creative playing field of the 1960s and ‘70s that he could accept those years of debauchery as a rite of passage. As an impressionable young adult struggling to break out in the late 1960s, Bowie became enamoured with America and the gritty urban portrayals of Beat Generation writers and, later, The Velvet Underground.
In 1967, Bowie was one of a tiny contingent of British artists who jumped on the Velvet Underground bandwagon early doors. Describing the New York band’s seminal debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico as one of his all-time favourite albums in a 2003 feature with Vanity Fair, Bowie recalled receiving a copy from his former manager Ken Pitt. “Pitt had done some kind of work as a PR man that had brought him into contact with the Factory,” Bowie noted. “Warhol had given him this coverless test pressing (I still have it, no label, just a small sticker with Warhol’s name on it) and said, ‘You like weird stuff—see what you think of this.’”
“What I ‘thought of this’ was that here was the best band in the world,” Bowie praised. From that point on, Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground greatly inspired Bowe’s output and consolidated his personal American Dream. Contrary to the dream examined in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Bowie’s dream was one of urban decadence, bohemian promiscuity and drug abuse.
Songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ paved a future of artistically inspiring highs and lows for Bowie. Meanwhile, the juxtaposing sweetness of tracks like ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ spoke to the Starman’s more romantic, colourful side. In a few short years, he surged to fame as Ziggy Stardust and began to spend much of his time in the US. “I always write well in New York,” Bowie once reflected.
Later, adding, “I realised the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing. I am a New Yorker. It’s strange. I never thought I would be.”
