It was not the side effects of the cocaine…

David Bowie seems to have had a go-to excuse when he didn’t want to explain himself: the drugs made me do it! Not everyone who studied or knew him buys it.

It occurred to me that Bowie might have gone back to this particular, peculiar well one too many times when talking with Daniel Rachel, author of This Ain’t Rock ‘N’ Roll: Pop Music, The Swastika and the Third Reich. As you’ll hear in our upcoming interview, Bowie gave multiple excuses for making a series of statements in the mid-70s that, taken at face value, were supportive of fascism and seemingly admiring of Hitler. Rachel’s view is not that any of these excuses was utterly false, but that even taken together they don’t necessarily provide a full accounting.

Although Rachel, a Bowie fan conceded, “I don’t think Bowie is a disingenuous person,” one of Bowie’s excuses stood out as especially unconvincing — that he was so out of his mind on drugs that he didn’t know what he was doing. Rachel added, “I’ve taken cocaine, and probably not to the extent that David Bowie did,” but insisted that you can still make “creative decisions,” and that Bowie was not on drugs “every single day, for 13 years.” Rachel’s point in part was that Bowie demonstrated an interest in Nazism for more than a decade, not just in the handful of his most controversial utterances in 1975 and 1976. Drugs, he says, “play a part, without a doubt,” but “it does not explain the full story.”

That reminded me of something longtime Bowie collaborator Earl Slick said to me when I interviewed him in 2024, in response to my mentioning that Bowie claimed that he did not remember making Station to Station. Slick responded, “I think he was full of shit,” explaining that he knew Bowie well “from 1974 to the day he died.” Slick connected Bowie’s claim to that period’s drug problems, saying he thinks Bowie “remembers more than he admitted to,” but did not want to talk about it, adding that he doesn’t blame him and wouldn’t want to either.

And that’s not all. In her memoir, Suzi Ronson wrote about Bowie being a jerk about his surprise, forced breakup of the Spiders from Mars. Ronson noted that once again, Bowie blamed cocaine for his bad behavior. “I laugh,” she wrote, “when I read this and don’t believe it for a second. It was raw, naked ambition, and a bloody-mindedness that is particular to a few people. I never saw cocaine in the dressing room during the last tour, never saw any sign of it. Even looking back after becoming familiar with the drug myself, I never saw any reason to believe this was what influenced David. It was revenge and control. David was an undeniable creative force and a blazing talent, but he couldn’t do it alone.”

So, Nazis, addiction, revenge and control. I get it. Like Earl said, I wouldn’t want to talk about such things either!