The story of how Roy Bittan ended up on David Bowie’s ‘TVC-15’
Pianist Roy Bittan is most famous for his most consistent gig: playing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Bittan first joined the E Street Band in 1974, just in time to perform on Springsteen’s breakthrough LP Born to Run. In fact, Bittan was so essential to Springsteen’s sound that when The Boss broke apart from his group in the early 1990s for albums like Human Touch and Lucky Town, Bittan was the only former member that Springsteen retained.
But Bittan wasn’t only playing with Springsteen. In fact, his piano work can be heard on some of the most famous albums of all time, including Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna, and Dire Straits’ Making Movies. One of Bittan’s most famous guest appearances came when he was recruited to appear on David Bowie’s 1976 opus Station to Station.
“I was staying at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles when we were on the Born To Run tour in 1975,” Bittan recalled to Rolling Stone in 2015. “David’s guitar player, Earl Slick, was a friend of mine. I bumped into him at the hotel and he said, ‘I can’t believe you’re here. We were just talking about you.’ David knew we were coming to town and he wanted a keyboard player.”
“When I arrived the next day at the studio David said to me, ‘Do you know who Professor Longhair is?’ I said, ‘Know him? I saw him play at a little roadhouse in Houston about three weeks ago!’ I wound up doing an imitation of Professor Longhair interpreting a David Bowie song,” he added. “We began with ‘TVC 15’ and I wound up playing on every song besides ‘Wild Is The Wind’. It must have only been about three days. It’s one of my favourite projects I’ve ever worked on.”
Bittan’s fingerprints are all over Station to Station. As he mentions, Bittan plays on five of the album’s six tracks. As two native New Yorkers, Bittan and Slick were speaking the same language, which likely helped Bittan get involved in Bowie’s projects.
“The first time I ever met Roy was in New York while I was working with some band called Tracks or something. I met Roy, and we became fast friends,” guitarist Earl Slick told Rolling Stone in 2013. “We were doing Station and it came up that we needed a piano player. David asked everybody in the band and I said, ‘You know what? Bruce Springsteen and the guys are staying at my hotel. My friend Roy is in the band. Why don’t I bring him down?’ That’s what happened with Roy.”
Bittan’s parts in ‘TVC-15’ are notoriously scattered across the composition, something that was done on purpose. “Well, [Bowie] didn’t want it organised at all, he really wanted it fucked up like when we did ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, kind of loose and stupid,” guitarist Carlos Alomar told David Buckley in the book Strange Fascination. “But then when we got to the end, he really wanted it to drive home.”
“During those times the drones of music was starting to get a bit vampy. By that I mean the music would stay in one place and just keep going,” Alomar added. “So, towards the end of the song, that’s what he wanted – ‘Oh my TVC 15, oh oh, TVC 15’. So we were just playing the rest of the song just to get to the end!”
Check out ‘TVC-15’ down below.
