[Senator Clay Davis]

Bowie doing so much coke he doesn't even remember making the album. Thanks cocaine, you did well.

In 1975, David Bowie moved to Los Angeles, and his life descended into chaos and turmoil. He was consuming massive amounts of cocaine, remaining awake for days on end (“I hate sleep,” he said. “I would much prefer staying up, just working, all the time”), and subsisting primarily on a diet of peppers and milk. At one point, his weight dropped below 100 pounds.

His state of mind was agitated and manic – holing up in a rented house in Bel Air and burning black candles, he claimed to see bodies fall past his window and became obsessed with the occult. In interviews, he proclaimed his admiration for Adolf Hitler (“One of the first rock stars … quite as good as Jagger”) and called for “a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny.” The songs on the album he recorded that year, Station to Station, were born from this madness and ended up transcending it as well.

Bowie would later refer to this period as “singularly the darkest days of my life.” Describing the time during a 1999 taping of the VH1 Storytellers series, he claimed it was “so steeped in awfulness that recall is nigh or impossible.” Before performing Station to Station‘s melancholy “Word on a Wing,” he added that the song was “unwittingly … a signal of distress; I’m sure that it was a call for help.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...tation-125797/