Station To Station - Production

Production

Station to Station was recorded in 1975 at Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles. In 1981, NME editors Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray surmised that it was cut—"in 10 days of feverish activity"—when Bowie decided that there was no hope of his producing a soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth. More recent scholarship contends that the album was recorded over a couple of months, in October–November 1975, and was in the can before Bowie began his abortive sessions on the soundtrack.

At various times to be titled The Return of The Thin White Duke, or Golden Years, Station to Station was co-produced by Harry Maslin, Bowie's associate for "Fame" and "Across the Universe" on Young Americans. Tony Visconti, who after a three-year absence had recently returned to the Bowie fold mixing Diamond Dogs and co-producing David Live and Young Americans, was not involved due to competing schedules. However, the recording did cement the band line-up that would see Bowie through the rest of the decade, with bassist George Murray joining Young Americans drummer Dennis Davis and rhythm guitarist Carlos Alomar.

The recording process developed with this team set the pattern for Bowie's albums up to and including Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980: backing tracks laid down by Murray, Davis and Alomar; saxophone, keyboard and lead guitar overdubs (here by Bowie, Roy Bittan and Earl Slick, respectively); lead vocals; and finally various production tricks to complete the song. According to Bowie, "I got some quite extraordinary things out of Earl Slick. I think it captured his imagination to make noises on guitar, and textures, rather than playing the right notes." Alomar recalled, "It was one of the most glorious albums that I've ever done ... We experimented so much on it". Harry Maslin added, "I loved those sessions because we were totally open and experimental in our approach".

Bowie himself remembers almost nothing of the album's production, not even the studio, later admitting, "I know it was in LA because I've read it was". The singer was not alone in his use of cocaine during the sessions, Carlos Alomar commenting, "if there's a line of coke which is going to keep you awake till 8 a.m. so that you can do your guitar part, you do the line of coke ... the coke use is driven by the inspiration." Like Bowie, Earl Slick had somewhat vague memories of the recording: "That album's a little fuzzy—for the obvious reasons! We were in the studio and it was nuts—a lot of hours, a lot of late nights."

The sleeve front cover used a black and white still from The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie, as the character Thomas Jerome Newton, steps into the space capsule that will return him to his home planet. Bowie had insisted on the cropped black and white image as he felt that in the original coloured full-size image the sky looked artificial. When Rykodisc reissued Bowie's catalogue in the early 1990s the colour version was used. The back cover showed Bowie sketching the Kabbalah Sephirot with chalk—something he had been doing on the set of the film.