Every chance, every chance that I take
I take it on the road
Those kilometers and the red lights
I was always looking left and right
Oh, but I'm
Always crashing in the same car
Jasmine, I saw you peeping
As I pushed my foot down to the floor
I was going 'round and 'round
The hotel garage
Must have been touching close to 94
Oh, but I'm
Always crashing in the same car
I take it on the road
Those kilometers and the red lights
I was always looking left and right
Oh, but I'm
Always crashing in the same car
Jasmine, I saw you peeping
As I pushed my foot down to the floor
I was going 'round and 'round
The hotel garage
Must have been touching close to 94
Oh, but I'm
Always crashing in the same car
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Bowie was a coke head, not an opiate user -- that's why his memory is fried, as he attests. Opiates don't do that, period.
Lots of coke and paranoia when he was making Low. That was the defining characteristic of the sessions for Bowie: Bowie being in a state that prevents him from remembering anything about the sessions, except why he can't remember them.
So, if it's about drugs, it's definitely about coke. And it'd be hard, I think, for a man as intelligent as Bowie to sing these lyrics, about driving in circles at high *speeds* and *crashing* without thinking on his coke use, regardless what the initial meaning was. It's pretty clearly coke, though.
BTW, there's a really great video clip that VH1 showed in a Behind the Music or whatever that shows Bowie clearly all coked up in the late 1970's (i.e. the period of Low, which has this song) and being driven around in a car -- he's looking all around, like he's paranoid, and his face is just so coked out.
It's also just a very striking lyric inasmuch as the image of repeatedly crashing in the same car is beautifully "existential". It really is all over the place, this album. I like it, too, but why is it that more critics put this as Bowie's greatest than any other album? It's very good, but it's also, like I said, all over the place, coked out, and whatnot. It's beautiful, but I'm surprised there's such consensus on it! And it's the peak of his "Berlin" period.
Funny, too, how the critics are the same way about Lou Reed's "Berlin" album. (He went all the way and just named it Berlin!) And, Berlin is actually not just an outgrowth of coked out craziness, but is, as I remember it, explicitly a concept album about a coked out chick. Or, that's some of the songs, at least.
And Low was not made about a "previous" period of drug use. Low was made while Bowie in the middle of his period of using cocaine most heavily -- it was the late 1970's and he was a rock star! Can't you hear the scatterbrained, verging on drug induced manic psychosis, misery of using too much coke, the feeling that comes long after the high and somewhere before the physical crash?
That's Low -- that and a myriad of beautiful and weird soundscapes, digital-flesh tearing synthesizer screeches and beep-boops, and Bowie's bleached white voice as otherworldly and thin-souled as it gets.
Either way, coke consumed our dear Starman and Berlin was where he got it under control. Not necessarily quit totally but, not letting it run his day to day life either.
Also, that clip you are speaking of just12 was from the film Cracked Actor, look it up on youtube, it's very interesting, following DB on his Diamond Dogs tour. It was filmed in 1974 I believe (released in '75) Some very coked up scenes in that, David Bowie once said that he should never have survived that time in his life. But the music...my God, only Bowie could be so brilliant while being so high!
Sure, it also seems to be about the recklessness of cocaine addiction as well. But it is still a masterpiece. It was great to hear it again, live.
Not much to say about the lyrics though. Guessing it's about self-destruction. That's all there's to it.