Chapter Eight: Cracked Actor (1975)

Off The Record: David Bowie

At the height of his fame in the mid-'70s, David Bowie battled his deepest demons in the City of Angels. After a costly split from his management company, he found himself adrift in Hollywood, driving himself to the brink of sanity with a diet of cocaine, milk and red peppers. Time passed in a breakneck blur as Bowie stayed up for three or four days at a stretch. The mix of sleep deprivation and drugs drove into a state almost indistinguishable from psychosis,. His grasp on reality slipping, he lost himself in paranoid delusions and obsessions with paranormal phenomena.. Bowie would remember few specifics of the period — just disturbing emotional impressions. Over the course of his days-long bouts of consciousness, his world would transform into “a bizarre nihilistic fantasy of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.” It was the low point of his life, and nearly the end of it. Somehow, in the midst of this personal nadir, he pulled himself back from the edge of oblivion, filming his defining movie role, and recording an album that many consider a masterpiece: 'Station to Station.'

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