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The anecdote bears a more than passing resemblance to The Hunger, a current high-gloss horror epic in which Bowie appears, memorably, as a kinky vampire who becomes suddenly susceptible to the ravages of old age and bad living. This may be a case of a movie feeding off an old myth, or a fresh myth being created to help a new movie; in any case, Bowie's musical excursions into sexual exotica, like John, I'm Only Dancing, have always seemed more like exercises in style than specific autobiography. His gay following was strongest, not surprisingly, in the Ziggy days, even though Bowie now claims that all the camp panoply was just "an image."
What does not seem to have been greatly embellished is Bowie's own narrative of his meandering into overindulgence. He evolved a new character called the Thin White Duke. He released David Live in 1974 with a cadaverous cover that prompted the subject himself to remark, "That record should have been called David Bowie Is Alive and Living Only in Theory. " An album of original songs, Diamond Dogs, with lyrics patched up from fragments à la Burroughs, gave early warning of disaster: "When they pulled you out of the oxygen tent you asked for the latest parties." "I was living these songs," Bowie says now. "I didn't really have to make me like that. I was like that."
Bowie's musical skills remained sharp, his sense of musical direction undiverted. Fame, from 1975's Young Americans, was co-written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar; the result, besides being Bowie's biggest single up till then, has a good claim to being the first breakthrough disco song. By 1975 he was living in Los Angeles, in a vast rented house in Bel Air, keeping company with dabblers in black magic and refusing to see his old friends. One of them, who managed to penetrate his defenses, recalls watching Bowie work his way through a long night of coke madness, then say, almost to himself, "I'll probably end up like Terry."
"I was somewhere else," he says now. "The songs were taking me over in the end. It may seem like three or four stages, but for me it was one continuous grinding journey. It led me just as near to insanity as I ever hope to get." An album recorded at this time, Station to Station, has all the scary strength of a first-draft suicide note. "Really horrendous" is the way Bowie describes the title track now, "just dreadful. It was a joyful anthem to nihilism." He had also become nuttily enamored of the "mythology" of fascism and would allow in interviews that he would make "an excellent dictator." At the end of a 1976 concert tour, he finally crashed, appropriately in Berlin, feeling "empty, drained and rotting inside."