The strange psychic feud between David Bowie and Jimmy Page
There are often periods of music that I’m jealous I wasn’t around for, but one of the most significant was the rise of David Bowie. There’s a video online of him performing ‘Space Oddity’ to a crowd who look off the planet themselves on whatever they’ve taken, the stage lighting hits Bowie’s face perfectly, and he sings into a miked-up telephone. The iconic lines “ground control to Major Tom” ring through in a fuzzy static, and the room falls silent at its magnitude.
The fact that the song was his debut established two things: 1) Bowie was a genius. 2) Bowie was strange. While the track was a thing of beauty, it was a bold move for someone to have their first track involve them embodying the character of a fictional spaceman, but it set a good foundation for Bowie that established him as an artist who could do anything he wanted. The only thing that would ever limit Bowie would be himself, and he wasn’t the sort of creative who put restraints on his art.
That being said, his exuberance and eclectic nature came to haunt him in 1975 when he moved to California to make his album Station to Station. Things were rough for him in the UK as there was growing tension between Bowie and his wife, Angie, so he took solace in the city of angels and generous helpings of cocaine and amphetamines. The result? One of Bowie’s most successful albums at the time, and little memory about how it was made.
“I have serious problems about that year or two,” Bowie admitted, “I can’t remember how I felt; I have no emotional geography […] I remember working with Earl (Slick) on the guitar sounds, and that’s about all I remember of it. I can’t even remember the studio. I know it was in LA because I’ve read it was.”
It wasn’t just drugs that were plaguing Bowie’s life at the time, though. His extracurricular activities in Los Angeles were far out, even by rockstars’ standards in the ‘70s. Bowie was surrounding himself with black candles, living with witches, collecting ancient Egyptian artefacts and worried that bodies were flying past his window. This rockstar was well and truly indoctrinated into the world of the occult.
Another rockstar who was often dubbed as being strange and into a manner of bordering on satanic activities was Jimmy Page. His otherworldly guitar style was so far removed from what people had come to expect that many believed he had sold his soul to the devil in a bid to get them. He didn’t do much for his image when he moved into a Manhattan townhouse previously owned by Aleister Crowley, the black-magic philosopher.
It was in this townhouse where Bowie and Jimmy Page had a brief conflict. It likely wasn’t anything big, but during his drug-induced states in Los Angeles, it was enough for him to worry that Page was secretly out to get him. Bowie managed to convince himself that Page was launching psychic attacks and working with witches in a bid to ruin him. Bowie’s response was rational, as he stocked all his urine in the fridge to stop Page from using it.
The drugs, sleepless nights, anxiety and spirituality all sounds exhausting. It begs the question, why would anyone put themselves through such a thing? Addiction, obviously, but there were practical advantages as well, as the guitarist Carlos Alomar put it: “The most disturbing thing that can happen in the studio is to have to go to sleep if you’re on a roll,” he said, “If there’s a line of coke which is going to keep you awake until 8 AM, so that you can do your guitar par, you do the line of coke.”
