David Bowie’s hatred of Los Angeles: “I really loathe it with a vengeance”
There has never been another musician or songwriter quite like David Bowie. After taking on multiple personas, each as groundbreaking and popular as the last, and producing a wealth of musical masterpieces, it can often be easy to forget that Bowie was, deep down, an ordinary person. On stage, he might have been an alien from Mars, but in between shows, he was a normal bloke from Brixton who got just as frustrated with endless travelling and fatigue as we all do.
For five decades, Bowie enjoyed a career at the ultimate height of rock and pop mastery. His music and incredible live performances earned him an incredibly dedicated following across the world. As a result, the songwriter was compelled to embark upon countless extensive world tours on a pretty regular basis. A byproduct of these world tours – in addition to all-encompassing fame and notoriety – was that Bowie was able to experience all corners of the globe, though some were more enjoyable than others.
Although Bowie started out on the streets of Brixton, which provided the songwriter with a lot of his early inspiration, he could not be contained to one place forever. Some of his most interesting work arose from his time living in Berlin alongside proto-punk icon and professional shirt-hater Iggy Pop.
Reflecting upon this period in a Rolling Stone interview in 1979, he shared his love for the German city, saying, “One thing about Berliners, […] they’re very matter-of-fact about celebrities, music, trends, whatever. It makes it a very good place for someone like me to live because I can be incredibly anonymous. You never get stopped here. They don’t seem particularly joyful about seeing a famous face.”
So, if Berlin was Bowie’s favourite place to reside, where was his least favourite? During that same interview, the songwriter referred to Los Angeles, California, as “my least favourite city”, going so far as to say, “I really loathe it with a vengeance.” In many ways, the hyper-capitalistic, sun-soaked and celebrity-obsessed land of Los Angeles is the direct antithesis of Berlin, yet Bowie made the strange decision to relocate to the West Coast city in 1974.
Admittedly, it was also during this time that Bowie was at his most drug-fueled, with cocaine a particular favourite of the Brixton boy during this era. In that sense, LA seemed the obvious choice for Bowie. After all, virtually everyone in 1970s Los Angeles was snorting enough white powder to prop up the economies of entire nations, and Bowie was making a significant contribution to that.
Los Angeles does little to endear itself towards visitors in the modern day, and the same was true back in the 1970s, but it seems as though Bowie’s issue with the American city lies within its people rather than its surroundings. “I’m sure it was because I was only involved with a circle of people,” he shared, “and my frame of reference was very, very limited. It was partly my own fault. But I saw no escape to find out about the other sides of LA. It was a closed shop to me, so I got in completely with toxic people.”
Thankfully for the Thin White Duke, he was able to cleanse himself of Los Angeles’ toxicity by moving to Berlin, where he enjoyed various debauched drug binges with Iggy Pop while occasionally attempting to go sober. He might have despised his experiences in Los Angeles, but they were a vital influence on the development of Bowie’s songwriting and musical material during this time – I suppose the greatest art does come from suffering.
