David habit was devastating. “I remember working with Earl on the guitar sounds,” Bowie has said, “and that’s about all I remember of it. I can’t even remember the studio. I know it was in LA because I’ve read it was.”
At an after-show party in 1974, he disappeared into a closet with Bette Midler and Mick Jagger. Tour manager Tony Zanetta recalled: “The three of them spent the whole party in there, doing coke. And I’d be very surprised if he didn’t have Bette Midler then, or at one time or another.”
It was a strange period in Bowie’s life, where, fueled by cocaine and amphetamines, he grew a strange obsession with fascism and the occult. In interviews, he started saying strange things like. “I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator.”
All that, though, was coming from the drugs, which his collaborators described as essential to the process of making the album. “The most disturbing thing that can happen in the studio is to have to go to sleep if you’re on a roll,” guitarist Carlos Alomar explained. “If there’s a line of coke which is going to keep you awake until 8 AM. So that you can do your guitar part, you do the line of coke.”
"I never got into acid either. I did it three or four times and it was colorful, but my own imagination was already richer. I never got into grass at all. Hash for a time, but never grass. I guess drugs have been a part of my life for the past 10 years, but never anything very heavy … I've had short flirtations with smack and things, but it was only for the mystery and the enigma. I like fast drugs. I hate anything that slows me down."
Bowie, himself, didn’t think the cocaine was such a good idea. He barely ate or slept during the sessions and, at his darkest point, withered down to 80 pounds. “That whole time is a blur topped with chronic anxiety,” he would later say, looking back on it. “I could have easily died.”
At one point he was “taking so much it would have killed a horse,” according
to record producer Tony Visconti.
“David would be strutting around on the guitar and Mick Jagger and I would be
playing duets, and then he and David would be mincing about.” Playboy model Bebe Buell also hung out with David, his wife Angie and Jagger at the hotel.She said: “Mick was worried because David was doing so much cocaine that hewould hallucinate.
“One time we were in David’s suite and he asked us if we could see the angels flying outside the window.”
