golden years?

For no readily apparent reason David Bowie's classic 1975 single "Golden Years" has just been reissued. It's allegedly been issued to promote the Station To Station cd box set, but as this set came out nearly a year ago I can't help thinking that EMI have yet again proved that they have no idea what they are doing...

To make matter worse the single comes with some dubious bonus remixes, by contemporary remixers who clearly have no idea what made the song so good in the first place. Hideous machine tooled drums and nasty synth stabs replace much of the warm and funky original music and Bowie himself is all but missing in a couple of cases. Again, who thought that this was a good idea?

Anyway, it got me thinking about Bowie at the time he recorded "Golden Years". By the end of 1975 he'd been living in America for nearly two years, during which time he'd barely eaten, and his drug intake had taken him to very brink of insanity. 

At the height of DB's coke madness in early 1975 he was living in a house in Los Angeles which looked like some sort of mausoleum - there were virtually no windows and those that existed had blinds down day and night ("pale blinds drawn all day / nothing to read nothing to say..." as DB would sing a year later). Bowie would frequently be found casting runic spells, lighting special candles to ward off evil spirits and storing his urine in the fridge so 'people' couldn't steal it for their undisclosed nefarious purposes. Many of the lyrics in the song "Station To Station" reflect Bowie's interest in the occult and arcane religions.
At one point an exorcism was carried out.

On his swimming pool. 

He was one seriously paranoid and deranged individual.

But it's clear from the testimonies of various people who were close to DB during this time that this wasn't all in his head, it wasn't all due to the drugs and the weird LA characters who hung around him. It seems that 'bad vibes' genuinely seemed to follow DB around. And very weird, unsettling and totally inexplicable things happened.

Harry Maslin (producer of some of Young Americans and all of Station To Station, and a man who is apparently the very definition of 'down to earth') recounts a day when a dark cloud hovered only over Bowie's house and rain fell for some considerable time. Yet the rest of the street remained dry and basked in the Los Angeles sunshine...

Bowie's regular hairdresser, who also counted Liz Taylor and many other Hollywood luminaries as clients, recounted how he was fixing DB's hair for the March '75 Grammy awards, when Bowie declared that everyone should leave straight away as they were all in great danger. He spooked the salon staff so much that they all left the building - just as the gas station across the road burst into flames for no obvious reason...

And one day in early 1975 Bowie visited Jimmy Page in his hotel suite. Page was at this point deeply fascinated with the dark arts and was researching Aleister Crowley, the notorious Scottish wizard. The various other people present in the hotel room immediately noticed a drop in temperature when Page and Bowie met. After a while the TV began turning itself on and off for no reason. All the time David and Jimmy seemed to be engaged in some kind of psychic stand off - glaring at each other, not speaking, as if somehow trying to out-spook one another. After a thick wine glass shattered without reason in Bowie's hand he decided to leave, later declaring that Page was too full of dark energy and that he (Bowie) didn't want to be drawn in...

Golden Years huh?