From "Low" by Hugo Wilcken, a book describing David Bowie's masterpiece "Low", which actually came about in the most dire of circumstances.

I believe this bit is required reading nowadays, just as we're reeling in the aftermath of Bowie's death, to not let The History of Bowie slip into the realms of hagiography and Oprah- and Disney-esque muck, and just show him as the person he really was; slip-ups and wins, all in total.

This bit of the story, however, it starts off with a bit of magic.

Crowleyism was not a rock novelty in 1975. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was a disciple; Can’s extraordinary Tago Mago (1971) alludes to Crowley; and arguably the most famous LP ever, Sgt Pepper, depicts Crowley on its cover. Previous Bowie songs also reference occultism (“Quicksand” namechecks Crowley, Himmler and the Golden Dawn society of which both were members), and traces of it subsist on later albums, including Low. But never was it so blatant as on Station to Station. What are we to make of this? Certain critics make a great deal indeed. The late Ian McDonald (whose Revolution in the Head remains the benchmark of Beatles literature) grandly depicts Bowie as a Prospero figure executing an “exorcism of the self, of mind, of the past ….Bowie has ascended the Tree of Life; now he wants to come down to earth, to love,” and to “cast his occult grimoire into the ocean.”

Then, things really started going for the no-food-and-loads-of-drugs-bit:

There’s another, rather more prosaic reading of these black magic ramblings. “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine,” Bowie opines a little further on in the song, but I think we can safely assume a case of protesting too much. Because the Station to Station sessions represent the high-water mark of Bowie’s prodigious drug intake. By this stage, Bowie had practically stopped eating and was subsisting on a diet of milk, cocaine and four packets of Gitanes a day. He was leading a vampyric existence of blinds-drawn seclusion in his Hollywood mansion, spliced with all-night sessions in the studio. There were times when he’d start recording in the evening then work all the way through until ten in the morning—and when told that the studio had been booked for another band, he’d simply call up for studio time elsewhere on the spot and start work again immediately. Other times, he could vanish altogether: “We show up at the studio,” says Slick. “‘Where is he?’ He shows up maybe five or six hours late. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up at all.” At this stage, Bowie could go five or six days without sleep, the point at which reality and imagination become irretrievably blurred: “By the end of the week my whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.”

Onwards, brave soldier:

Essentially, Bowie was suffering from severe bouts of cocaine psychosis, a condition very similar to schizophrenia, with its highly distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, affectlessness and a marked tendency towards magical thinking. His interviews of the time are classics of messianic delusion, as he raves on about Hitler being the first rock star, or his own political ambitions (“I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism.”). The flipside of messianic fantasy is of course paranoid delusion, which Bowie also displayed in spades. He imagined one of his advisers was a CIA agent; a backing singer was apparently a vampire. During one interview, Bowie suddenly leapt up and pulled down the blind: “I’ve got to do this,” he jabbered. “I just saw a body fall.” He proceeded to light a black candle then blow it out. “It’s only a protection. I’ve been getting a little trouble from the neighbours.” How much of all this was theatre and how much delusion? Bowie was evidently past making such distinctions. His wife of the time, Angie, recounts getting a phone call from him one day in 1975; Bowie was somewhere in Los Angeles with a warlock and two witches who wanted to steal his semen for a black magic ritual. “He was talking in slurred, hushed tones, and hardly making any sense and he was crazed with fear.”

Bowie during his Thin White Duke era.

Bowie was quite capable of camping up his “weirdness” when it suited him. And yet if only a quarter of the stories circulating about him from this time are true—of his keeping his urine in the fridge, of black magic altars in the living room, of professional exorcisms of his swimming pool and so on—this would still be a man with serious mental health issues, to say the least. On top of his cocaine addiction and related delusions, Bowie was also physically cut off from any kind of “normal” existence. Life at Doheny Drive, where he’d taken up residence, resembled a kind of court, peopled with musicians, dealers, lovers, and a whole host of parasitic shysters and hangers-on. His assistant Corinne “Coco” Schwab acted as a gatekeeper, sorting out the logistics of his life, insulating him from situations and people that upset him. His ability to do anything for himself had become severely restrained. Fame, cocaine, isolation and Los Angeles (“the least suitable place on earth for a person to go in search of identity and stability,” as he’d put it later) had all conspired to spin Bowie off into a very dark place indeed.

Given this state of affairs, the wonder is that Bowie got anything done in the studio at all. And, in fact, by Station to Station there’s very much a sense of the artist as well as the man in crisis. It had been a year since the Young Americans sessions, and he’d done very little recording since then. In May 1975 he’d taken his friend Iggy Pop in to record some material, but the session had quickly become chaotic, with Pop and Bowie even coming to blows at one stage. This was at the height of his “stick insect paranoia look,” according to guitarist James Williamson, who’d found Bowie slumped at the control booth, enveloped in a hideous wall of distorted noise.

For Station to Station, Bowie went into the studio with only two songs, both of which were eventually changed beyond recognition. He was accustomed to working extremely quickly—the bulk of Ziggy Stardust, for instance, was done in a two-week period, itself coming only weeks after the recording of Hunky Dory. By contrast, the Station to Station sessions stretched out over two and a half months, yielding just five original compositions and a histrionic cover version of “Wild Is the Wind.”

“You retain a superficial hold on reality so that you can get through the things that you know are absolutely necessary for your survival,” Bowie mused in 1993. “But when that starts to break up, which inevitably it does—around late 1975 everything was starting to break up—I would work at songs for hours and hours and days and days and then realise after a few days that I had done absolutely nothing. I thought I’d been working and working, but I’d only been rewriting the first four bars or something. And I hadn’t got anywhere. I couldn’t believe it! I’d been working on it for a week! I hadn’t got past four bars! And I’d realise that I’d been changing those four bars around, doing them backwards, splitting them up and doing the end first. An obsession with detail had taken over.” It was yet another consequence of the psychosis, and that eerie, overwrought quality is all over Station to Station. It’s the cocaine album par excellence, in its slow, hypnotic rhythms, its deranged romantic themes, its glacial alienation, its dialogue with God (“Word on a Wing”), in the pure white lines of the album cover, in the hi-fi sheen that’s clean enough to snort off.

In Bowie's words on "Station to Station": "I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was."

As Bowie saved Iggy ((Detailed here, for example.)), both personally and professionally, it is possible that Bowie's life was saved, in part, by moving from the USA to Berlin. In doing this, he started what he called his triptych of Berlin albums (i.e. "Low", "Heroes" and "Lodger") and had to rediscover a new musical language, as he said.

Brian Eno together with Bowie was an enormous thing, but Bowie ridding himself of drugs and non-sleep were probably even more influential; but before making "Low", Bowie attempted to make the soundtrack for "The Man Who Fell To Earth", a film he starred in. To say he failed would be an understatement. At one point, according to Paul Buckmaster, Bowie had to be led out of the studio due to what seemed to be an overdose.

Brian Eno, circa 1975.

Still, after meeting Brian Eno and relocating, things happened. There are clear "parallel streams" with Eno's album "Another Green World", which Bowie liked, and where Bowie wanted to go. Lush sound effects and sweeping synths permeate "Low", as well as a world clearly beyond Kraftwerk ((More on the Kraftwerk/Bowie influences, from Wilcken's "Low": For a couple of years, Bowie’s and Kraftwerk’s careers seemed to intertwine. While Bowie was at work on Low, Kraftwerk were in the studio recording their groundbreaking Trans-Europe Express. An ambiguously kitsch photo of the group looking like a 1930s string quartet adorns the album cover. The title track cheekily namechecks both Bowie and his own “train” album (“from station to station to Düsseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie”); Bowie returned the favour on “Heroes” (“V2-Schneider”). Both Bowie and Kraftwerk conceived of their act as a whole—the music, the clothes, the artwork, the concerts, the interviews, all integrated and self-referring. They both nodded to pan-Europeanism, recording versions of their songs in French, German and English. Both nurtured a camp sensibility, working the delicate seam that lies between irony and earnestness. Both blended postmodern pastiche with a retro-modernist aesthetic. Both made emotional music by seeming to negate emotion. Seen through the prism of psychiatry, the work of both comes across as rather autistic (Bowie’s autism is schizophrenic; Kraftwerk’s obsessive-compulsive).)), whose "album Radio-Activity" was played to audiences prior to his entering, on the Station to Station tour. Even still, kosmische musik was probably altogether a bigger influence; Bowie even tried to get Michael Rother from Neu! to play on work on the album "Heroes" - which by Bowie erroneously is remembered as "Station to Station" - to which Rother declined. Notably, both Rother and his Neu! fellow bandmember Klaus Dinger were members of Kraftwerk, until they left the band.

Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother (the band Neu!) as photographed by Anton Corbijn in 2000.

Prior to Berlin, following the Station to Station tour, Bowie vacationed in France (with Iggy Pop) for a wind-down, before heading to Switzerland, where he spent some time avoiding his then-wife, Angie. During that time, Bowie read a hell of a lot of books. ((Writing of books: later in Berlin, he would meet Christopher Isherwood and inquire about his time and books about Berlin, of which one was made into the film "Cabaret".)) While there, Iggy Pop joined and the two rehearsed what would later become the sparse quasi-masterpiece "The Idiot", where Bowie and Pop could both do exactly what they wanted. Later, some tracks that were recorded for Iggy ended up on "Low"; you can hear Iggy's background vocals on "What in the World". The session musicians in France didn't even know whose album they were working on at the time.

Iggy Pop and David Bowie, in Berlin.

Bowie called Tony Visconti, the man who would record "Space Oddity" with Bowie and produce several of his albums, including his last studio album, "Blackstar", was called and asked if he didn't mind wasting a month of his life on an experiment if it didn't go well. In a château. In France. Well, yes. Bowie asked what Visconti could contribute, and the answer was pitch-shifting Eventide Harmonizer. Bowie asked what it did, and Visconti said "it fucks with the fabric of time!" to which Bowie was delighted, and Eno went berzerk (in a good way).

David Bowie and Tony Visconti, circa 1969.

Carlos Alomar, Bowie collaborator for three decades ((As quoted in this interview with Alomar, conducted just after Bowie's death.)), comments on "Low":

Being called in to do the trilogy with Brian Eno was—not only for me, but for all the fans, all the record companies, all the audiophiles, all the musicians—that was a leap of faith. To think that you would say "an album has an A-side and a B-side—and what do you care what I do on my B-side?" If that's the case, there's this new thing called electronic music, watch this. And in one fell swoop, you introduce electronic and ambient music to a general public that is clueless to the advent of a new pop form. It was the advent of a new future for music. And so we have to consider that exploration and experimentation really was the core to the future, and David introduced it to all of us in a palatable form.

Carlos Alomar and David Bowie.

Basically, everything for "Low" was written from scratch, all was worked-on overnight. Experimentation was key. The musicians could jam on something, Bowie would hear what was churned out, pick his bits, contribute, write stuff from scratch, use a portable synth - an EMS, the same synth being used by himself decades later on "Heathen" - and also Eno/Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies".

So, oracles consulted and jams concluded - "Low" was born.