Doing all right, but you gotta get smart

Thursday music corner: This November 1975 A-side of crystalline funk was more in keeping with the Philadelphia soul jive of Bowie’s previous Young Americans album than the album it was the lead single release from, the darkly serious Station to Station. Bowie appeared miming Golden Years moderately accurately on US TV show Soul Train amidst his emaciated, orange-haired L.A. cocaine blizzard phase. The performance helped the song reach number 10 in the US charts, whereas in the UK it did two spots better, reaching number 8. (In the New Zealand pop charts it made it to number 18). 

Bowie scholar Nicholas Pegg describes the Station to Station album, Bowie's tenth release, as ‘the precise halfway point on the journey between [Bowie albums] Young Americans and Low. There are enough finger-snapping grooves to keep the American market buoyant, but elsewhere the album prefigures the glacial mechanisation of David’s imminent “European canon”’ [his three Berlin-recorded albums, Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger].

David Bowie – Golden Years (1975)

See also:

Blog: David Bowie is..., 22 September 2015 

Blog: Sukita / Bowie exhibition, 16 September 2012

Blog: In the lair of the Goblin King, 12 July 2009