On Thursday 7 April, news sources revealed that Dennis Davis, David Bowie’s drummer from 1975 to 1980, had died of lung cancer. In the three months that have passed since David Bowie’s death, one thing that has been repeatedly highlighted in the resultant obituaries and retrospectives, is that Bowie not only had a sure touch in drawing supremely gifted musicians into his creative world but also that the working relationship he had with his musical partners was one of genuine collaboration – as much as he drew them into new areas, their working methods also enhanced his own musical direction.
This was certainly true of Dennis Davis. Alongside rhythm guitarist and bandleader Carlos Alomar and bassist George Murray, Davis formed the three-man rhythm section who provided the backbone of Bowie’s most consistent period, covering the albums from Young Americans (1975) to Scary Monsters (1980). These three black New Yorkers brought an innate understanding of funk and soul to Bowie’s previously Eurocentric musical palette, and accompanied him as his music journeyed from slick soul to angular, avant garde rock, climaxing with the art-rock stylings of the Scary Monsters album, which distilled the previous five years of sonic experimentation in an artfully crafted rock masterpiece that wrapped up Bowie’s most triumphant decade and would point the way forward for all who followed in his wake, from U2 to Blur, Radiohead and more. On many of these albums, as part of Bowie and co-producer Tony Visconti’s enthusiasm for pioneering studio techniques, Davis’ drum sound was enhanced and distorted by digital delay, as on Low, giving it a harsh sounding, Kraftwerkian coldness, or a combination of heavy procession and ceiling-mounted microphones as on Scary Monsters, to create a migraine-inducing thud. These developments would be much emulated throughout the ‘80s and beyond, but that would not be so were it not for the innate abilities of the sticksman behind such gimcrack.
Dennis Davis’ background was in jazz, his early mentors were Max Roach and Elvin Jones. Among his accomplishments, he had worked with Roy Ayers, Stevie Wonder and George Benson.
Davis was one of a number of black musicians Bowie hired in the fall of 1974 to bring to life his adoption of American soul that he’d first fell in love with as a teenager, when he heard ‘James Brown Live at the Apollo’, and more recently with the slick stylings of Philadelphia soul, effortlessly blended with his own transatlantic style of impressionistic, imagery-heavy lyrics and unconventional approach to composition and arrangement (you will rarely find a 4/4 time signature in a Bowie song). Ironically, although Bowie had chosen Philadelphia to record his ‘plastic soul’, his band was almost entirely comprised of New Yorkers.
Davis’ introduction into Bowie’s world was immediately announced with the unmistakable drum intro to the title track and opener of the Young Americans album, recorded at Gamble & Huff’s Sigma Sound studios, and made his presence felt throughout the album, whether on the cavernous drum beats of the sublime ballad Can You Hear Me? and the gentle yet insistent percussion that forms the backbeat of the mantra-like Right, or the pounding, four to the floor disco rhythm of John I’m Only Dancing (Again) – a funked-up remake of Bowie’s glam single from ’72, left off Young Americans at the last minute, but a surprise Top 20 hit in 1979 when Bowie plucked it from the vaults to be his first twelve inch single.
Davis, Alomar and Murray would become Bowie’s second distinct rhythm section of the 1970s – following the Hull-based power trio of the Spiders From Mars (1971-1973) – and formed the musical core of his next album, Station To Station. A soul flavour remained on this album, in the grooves of the fingersnapping Golden Years and ice-cold funk of Stay, but with Bowie ever a journeyman, and always quick to tire of formula, he was also channeling the motorised rhythms of Dusseldorf bands Neu! and Kraftwerk, further pursuing his penchant for opulent, melodramatic and stagey ballads, and more remote, introverted lyrical themes. Davis and co. – complemented with the whiter-than-white Earl Slick on lead guitar and Bruce Springsteen’s Roy Bittan on piano – followed him every step on the way. Here, Davis matches Bowie every beat on Station To Station’s monolithic title track, from the menacing build-up of the prolonged intro, to the rapturous epiphany of the middle section, through to the bierkeller sing-song playout. Elsewhere, he’s found funking out on the soul workout Stay, replete with nifty hi hat and kick drum breaks, while Alomar and Slick indulge in contrapuntal parries and thrusts on guitars, and notably provides the steady bedrock for the album’s closing ballad Wild Is The Wind, with celebrated drum fills after Bowie’s two climactic “Don’t you know your life itself…” vocal peaks.
The Alomar/Murray/Davis lineup joined The Dame on his whirlwind 1976 world tour, this time accompanied by Stacey Heydon on guitar and Yes’ Tony Kaye on keyboards, and their inestimable prowess can be sampled on the infamous radio broadcast of the Nassau Coliseum show, much bootlegged and later officially released as part of the Station To Station boxed set in 2010.
Next stop, Europe, where over four years, Bowie, Alomar, Murray and Davis, in tandem with Tony Visconti, and accompanied by a variety of guitarists – Ricky Gardiner, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew – cut the so-called ‘Berlin trilogy’. In truth, only one album – “Heroes” – was recorded entirely in Berlin, with the full band tracks on Low taped in Paris and Lodger in Switzerland and New York either side of another world tour. But the myth remains.
Another more tangible part of the Berlin trilogy lore was, of course, that Brian Eno was Bowie’s creative foil for these three albums. Some of the more amusing anecdotes from the recording of the Berlin albums arise from the incongruous scene of the academically-minded arch-theorist Eno attempting to incalculate in this trio of no-nonsense, streetwise New York R&B musicians hifalutin’ conceptual conceits such as randomly pointing to chords on a blackboard, doling out his Oblique Strategies cards to provide ‘motivations’ for their playing, and, famously, suggesting the rhythm section swap instruments to give Boys Keep Swinging a genuine, garage band sound.
As Davis mused drolly on the acclaimed Five Years documentary, “Brian Eno… He was a character…”
It was the cultural mishmash of taking three funky American R&B musicians and getting them to bring their own character to Bowie and Eno’s claustrophobic, neurotic new wave pop that made the Berlin trilogy such a much-imitated formulation. In the aforementioned Five Years documentary, Carlos Alomar describes how he approached the edgy Breaking Glass as a kind of deconstructed blues, and Davis himself made several unique contributions – on “Heroes”’ Blackout, introduced by a cardiac arrest kickdrum, he colours Bowie’s manic ode to panic attacks with tumbling drum fills and conga percussion that provide it with a hothouse atmosphere which heightens the drama and intensity. Elsewhere, on Bowie’s ode to self-destruction, Always Crashing In The Same Car, the opening hiss of Davis’ snare and the barrelling drum fills propel the song’s circular motion, while the ‘heartbeat’ drum track of instrumental A New Career In A New Town adds urgency and underpins the track’s wistfulness.
On the 1977 albums Low and “Heroes” Davis obligingly allowed Bowie and Visconti to experiment with his drum sound to create a cold, clinical effect that fought against the natural warmth of his playing. On Low, Davis’ drums were processed with a digital delay and pre-echo, while “Heroes” used gated microphones to create a drum sound that Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins later popularised through their own machinations on Intruder, Mama and In The Air Tonight. If this sounds like Davis was a mere patsy for the artful European white guys’ playful experiments, you only have to check out the live album Stage, from 1978, or tour footage from the same tour, to see how adeptly he translated these effects into live renditions of the same material – by my reckoning, the Stage live recordings of Breaking Glass, Blackout or Heroes give the studio versions a run for their money.
There would be two more collaborations – 1979’s Lodger, generally seen as the poor relation of 1977’s duo, and 1980’s Heroes. Lodger was relatively low on studio trickery, although Eno contributed more eccentric gadgets and gizmos to his own armour (anticipating 1981’s My Life In The Bush of the Ghosts), and so you hear Davis’ percussion at its most organic – from the gentle footfall of drums that introduces Fantastic Voyage, to the Neu!-referencing beat of Bowie’s piratical flight of whimsy Red Sails, the clipped metronomy that underpins Repetition’s queasy tale of domestic abuse, and most notably, Look Back In Anger’s urgent percussion like a galloping horse.
1980’s Scary Monsters would be the Alomar/Murray/Davis last appearance on a Bowie album, although Alomar continued to be Bowie’s reliable sideman for his three EMI-USA albums. The album was recorded in New York’s Power Station, where a combination of cavernous acoustics, a ceiling-mounted mike for added ambience, and heavy compression in the mix, created a prototype of the ‘stadium rock’ sound that would define the ‘80s. In conjunction with Robert Fripp’s squalling guitar, it’s one of the album’s defining aural signatures.
The album was a return to a more conventional style of composition for Bowie – by his standards, at least. It yielded the number one hit single, Ashes To Ashes, an unusual hit record by anyone’s reckoning, and Davis made his mark here, too, by adopting a backbeat that was influenced by ska records, an anachronism in a record full of anachronisms, from the nursery rhyme coda, to the out of sync backing vocals, and Chuck Hammer’s guitar-synth.
As the 1980s unfolded, Davis and his sideman, bassist George Murray, were cast aside as Bowie moved onto another chapter – a typical scenario for a Bowie musician. It’s widely felt that what Bowie gained with his decisive move into the mainstream in the 1980s, he lost in terms of fruitful musical collaboration. With the notable of exception of Texan bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan on Let’s Dance, there would be no one with their own heritage he could bounce ideas off to take his music into unusual spaces, until in the dying days of the decade, he met with Bostonian noise architect Reeves Gabrels.
Unless you’re a name drummer – and most of those, linked to the power groups of the 60s and 70s are dead now – your contributions will go unmarked bar for the faithful few. But Dennis Davis will, or should be, mourned by anyone whose neck hairs have pricked up at the opening bars of Young Americans, Sound And Vision or “Heroes”. We are still learning to come to terms with the passing of David Bowie, but a significant part of Bowie’s work was equally defined by the many men and women who gave form to his ideas, and Dennis Davis’ contribution was as significant as any.
Author bio: James Gent has contributed to several acclaimed publications devoted to cult and popular television including 1001 TV Series You Must Watch Before You Die, You & Who: Contact Has Been Made and Blake’s Heaven: Maximum Fan Power. In 2014, he wrote the biography for the official Monty Python website.