Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

all up. So Iggy going from ‘Loose’ to a sound that
was very much not-loose resonated for your British.”
When Low was completed and delivered to RCA,
the label brass, predictably, had a fit. They could not
follow up back-to-back hits with this. Bowie insisted
that the record was complete and ready for them to
release. RCA, so desperate for sellable summer
product, opted to issue a best-of instead,
ChangesOneBowie, in May. This album stands as
one of the most satisfying singles collections ever
released, proving just how agile Bowie had become
with regard to including at least one perfect radio
song on each of his post-Ziggy RCA albums. The
Mercury single “Space Oddity,” bought back by Tony
Defries before his departure, opens side one. The
label used the stopgap period to try to reason with
their immovable star, but soon the Christmas
shopping window came and went as well. Low finally
hit shops intact in mid-January of 1977. Some critics
were as baffled and incensed as RCA was. Charles
Shaar Murray gave it more of an indictment than a
review in the NME.
“I had gotten through a nasty eighteen-month
amphetamine addiction,” he says today. “I
recognized in Low a depiction, possibly a
glamorization, of the kind of speed psychosis. Bowie
had a much bigger budget than I did. I recognized it
as the psychosis of soft white powder. I thought he
was glamorizing the state from which I just clawed
myself. I put it to him and he admitted, ‘Yeah, that’s
what it was.’ I think Low is a fantastic record. I never