“A city I really detest”: Why did David Bowie hate Los Angeles so much?
Throughout every single reinvention, David Bowie was always able to paint the best picture that he could through his music.
Not every one of his records had to be the most successful thing in the world, but when you look at all of them next to each other, they helped paint a better picture of someone who refused to rest on his laurels whenever he worked on his masterpieces. He was always looking for the next thing to trigger his inspiration, but he did have a lot of reservations about setting foot in places where he felt like he could never function properly.
For instance, it’s not like ‘The Starman’ was ever going to be going back to the world of vaudeville-style ditties by any stretch. His actual debut album is a fun time if you’re willing to forgive some of the more fanciful language, but the fact that he didn’t even consider it his proper debut album and eventually moved on and rebranded himself one album later is pretty telling of what he thought about this era of his career.
But even when he was at the top of the rock and roll world, there were moments when he felt like he couldn’t keep himself moving. He was always inventing different characters, but even if he had planned on working inside the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ character for the rest of his life, chances are he would have become bored quite quickly and retired the whole thing. So that means making up new characters, but they weren’t always the most savoury personalities for anyone to take on.
Because if parents thought that the androgynous side of Bowie on Aladdin Sane was a bit too much for them to take, they had no idea what they were in for with ‘The Thin White Duke’. Sure, he might have been a snappy dresser and could look effortlessly cool in the same way that someone like Frank Sinatra could, but underneath all of that was someone desperately addicted to cocaine and more prone to make politically incorrect statements, such as claiming that one of the first rock stars was Hitler.
It’s hard to tell how much of this kind of behaviour was the side effects of the cocaine, but Bowie pointed directly to the city of Los Angeles as to why he hated working this era of his career. The ‘City of Angels’ may have a certain ray of sunshine around it most of the time, but even in the grip of Hollywood, Bowie couldn’t help but feel that everything that he was seeing felt too plastic for him to sustain a career there.
He would eventually fall in love with New York towards the end of his life, but he felt that there was no need for him to spend too much time in LA after trying to clean up his act, saying, “I went to Los Angeles and lived there for a couple of years which is a city I really detest. I went there to live among people that I didn’t like very much to see what would happen to my writing. [I detested it] twice as much once I went there. Everything it represented. It’s sort of a blister on the backside of humanity.”
And while many people have moved there to try and make their dreams come true, it’s not like Bowie was the only one with an aversion to Los Angeles. George Harrison famously had a bit of a naughty period there when making Extra Texture, and even though John Lennon’s parties in LA are the stuff of legend, you can’t help but look back on those sessions he did without feeling a little hint of sadness that things weren’t all well in his life.
Which is probably why Bowie made such a drastic change when moving to Berlin for his next string of albums. Records like Low were going to be a complete overhaul of his usual writing style, but that didn’t matter so long as he was making the music that he felt best suited his personality. Anyone else could have spent an eternity in Los Angeles with Bowie’s level of charisma, but he would much rather focus on being the best artist he could than cater to whatever the Sunshine State wanted.
