During the hedonistic ’70s, David Bowie would admittedly partake in various very illegal substances.
“We’d sit in the control room and blow our brains out and not start working ’till hours later,” long-standing guitarist Earl Slick admits in his new book, Guitar. “Sometimes days later.”
Slick, who debuted with Bowie on 1974’s David Live, said things were much different by the time they gathered for sessions that produced The Next Day in 2013. “We were older, obviously, and there was no dope – none,” Slick writes. “By 2012, we had long-time sobriety. It wasn’t even a part of our lives anymore. But what we were doing then was hammering espresso.”
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That wasn’t the only more responsible indulgence.
“At a great bakery that’s been there forever called Bella Ferrara, a little, old-school place, I’d pick up [toasted almond] biscotti [biscuits] – which are insanely good – and bring them to the rehearsals,” adds Slick, 71, whose real name is Frank Madeloni.
“David would smash a whole box of them. He’d kill them along with his espresso, of course,” he writes. “When we got to The Next Day, on my first day I stopped at the bakery and picked up biscotti. David picked up pastries from Dean + DeLuca, and we had an espresso machine in the studio, and we just hammered the shit out of all of it.”
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The Next Day was Bowie’s first album in a decade, and soared to No. 1 in the U.K. and No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The comeback project was recorded in secret between May 2011 and October 2012. “We had a very big control room, and we made ourselves at home and were like pigs in shit,” Slick says. “In the old days, we would have done the same thing, only with different substances.”
Bowie worked with a different lineup for 2016’s Blackstar, which arrived just days before he succumbed to cancer at 69.
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